Attack On! RWBY
by Snowflames
Summary: Dropped into a world on the brink of disaster, team RWBY tries to find a way home. But it takes much more than flashy acrobatics and cocky attitudes to overcome the challenges in their path...
1. Chapter 1

Picture Credit: Hakuku (rocket on tumblr, Hakuku on dA)...

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Copyright Notice: I own neither RWBY nor SnK/AOT.

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Author's note: Too lazy to write one.

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Update: Correcting some factual inaccuracies.

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The shattered moon shone over the cargo yard as Ruby Rose hopped from one container to another. Moonlight cast her silhouette over the field, which turned into a blur when she accelerated. Six additional shadows followed her, fanning out behind in a V formation like migratory birds. Their footsteps were eclipsed by the loud thrumming of the Bullhead above. The twin-engine tilt-jet aircraft forged ahead at about 100 feet high, thick smoke coming out from one of its engines. It flew at a limp to its left, though it was still chugging ahead at a snail's pace toward the port.

"Nora!" Ruby's sister's voice came from behind her; it was loud enough to even overpower the sputtering of propeller engines. Yang Xiaolong had always been loud and boisterous, so Ruby was not in the least surprised by her bellowing. "Blake's still on there! What if you made the plane crash!?"

"Let's catch her before she falls off!" Nora Valkyrie, the rather airheaded member of the JNPR team, cheered before she let out a high-pitched wail of excitement. The smoking engine of the Bullhead was the result of when she landed a lucky shot when it attempted to lift off. The redhead hopped and jumped, her shadow on the ground shifting erratically with her movements.

Ruby had no time to worry about her teammate's antics. They were steadily gaining ground, but they had been sprinting at the tail of the crippled aircraft for a while. There was a limit to human stamina, and Ruby was not sure if everyone could follow the plane for as long as it took to exhaust its fuel. Besides, the port was near; given how the plane was heading there, it was safe to assume that Roman Torchwick had his minions and perhaps an alternative mode of transportation there.

Roman was a notorious criminal in Vale for armed robbery, kidnapping, arson, assault, battery, and petty burglary. The man had been on Vale police's most-wanted list for more than a decade, but every time they were close to catching him, he could somehow slip away, and then surface some time later to cause more mayhem. And apparently, he had some impressive backers; tilt-engine aircrafts like the Bullhead were not easy to come by. Why he kidnapped Blake Belladonna—her teammate—was unknown. Vale police had never figured out a motive for Roman's actions save for profit. He had mostly targeted Dust shipments, because high-grade Dust—being the fuel for extraordinary powers—would fetch great prices on the black market.

Speaking of Dust, Ruby had an idea. "Weiss! Can you do that launching thing again?" She shouted to the white ballerina with a side ponytail and dressed like a princess behind her to the right, who had a rapier in her hand and following Ruby as closely as she could. If she could just catch up to the aircraft and latch onto it…

"Who do you think I am!?" Weiss' shrill cry was accompanied by the appearance of a large complex red glyph a dozen feet in front of Ruby. With a grunt, Ruby stepped onto the glyph. It pulsed with a burst of light and bounced Ruby about thirty feet up into the air. Unhooking her weapon, the Crescent Rose, from her waist on the back, she cocked the short rifle and fired a round behind her. The blue-tinted muzzle flare lit the area up for a moment, and Ruby could feel her body lurch forward as it was propelled further still, her speed increasing to the point where the wind was threatening to rip her cloak from her dress.

The moment she reached the top of her trajectory, a white glyph in the same double snowflake shape as the blue one appeared under her slightly in front. Weiss was not far behind Ruby in the air; with a wave of her rapier, several additional glyphs appeared, serving as a platform for the team to hop up. Giving a small smirk, Ruby cycled her weapon and pulled her trigger once again when she found purchase against the glyph in mid-air. With a grunt, she leaped up again, using the recoil and the force of the round to propel her farther forward.

"Woo-hoo!" Nora was behind Ruby as well. She was much less concerned about how they were leaping between precariously small platforms in mid-air high above the earth where a single misstep would cause them to fall to their deaths, but more about how enjoyable the entire experience was. Ruby had no time to think about how Nora looked at the moment, as she was focused on reaching the aircraft itself.

The hatches of the plane opened, two on the side and one on the back. The plane turned out to be a military variant; machine guns were brought to bear, and a split second later, a stream of bullets and tracers grazed past Ruby toward the ground. Ruby had to use her rifle to adjust her flight path. In the air her maneuverability was greatly diminished, and she had little time to return fire. But whenever she reached the top of her trajectory, there was always a white glyph under her, appearing split seconds before she would start her descent. Her landing was surprisingly heavy; the glyph released a burst of light as it cushioned her foot, and with another shot she soared up. There was only a dozen feet before she could lodge Crescent Rose into the plane and provide an anchor for everyone else to grab on.

Roman Torchwick appeared in the rear hatch. The man was sharply dressed for a criminal, not to mention the thick lit cigar he had in his mouth. He had a head full of curly orange hair, with bangs long enough that covered his small green right eye. A black bowler's hat with a red stripe adorning the portion immediately above the rim covered his head. He wore a white overcoat with tall red collars, inside which a grey scarf was wrapped around his neck. Ruby would have loved to reach for that scarf and turn it into a noose, but he was a bit too far away. With a hand wrapped in a black glove, Roman held his cane and pointed it toward Ruby. The bottom of the cane flipped up into a crosshair, and he fired.

A red glowing projectile screamed for her. It was fast, but Ruby prepared for it the minute Roman's figure emerged from the hatch. Twisting her body to the side, the blob barely missed her when it travelled inches from her front. There was no time to complain about the heat radiating from the projectile, and Ruby spun in mid-air, Crescent Rose expanding into its full scythe form.

"Give her back!" Ruby yelled, her hand landing on a white glyph as she flipped in mid-air. Cycling Crescent Rose again, she fired behind her, propelling her close enough to the rear hatch that with one swing she could lodge the tip of the Rose into the metal.

"Oh, is this what you want, red?" That cool, mocking voice made Ruby want to slice him in half right there, but he was holding up an unconscious Blake with his hand.

Ruby grunted and her eyes narrowed. How cowardly, using his hostage as a shield! She was about to respond when she saw a white stream fly past the aircraft and plant itself firmly into the wing on the right before exploding. The blast rocked the aircraft and almost made Roman lose his footing. His grip on Blake loosened, and the girl fell from the hatch into Ruby's body.

"NORA! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?" Weiss was indignant. The upward momentum Ruby had was immediately neutralized when Blake landed in her arms, and Blake's body blocked the red girl dressed in a frilly Gothic dress so that she could not swing her scythe.

"Kids these days, crazy as bats—whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, NO!" Roman finally managed to stabilize his stance, though something else rolled past his foot. Catching sight of what it was, his eyes widened and he almost stepped off of the plane to catch it, only to be stopped by a pair of his henchmen.

The device that slipped out of the cargo hold was a small, studded sphere, not unlike a spiky ball with all the sharp spikes chopped in half at the middle. Each stud had a small gem on top of it, and each gem glowed with a different, radiant color. The sphere itself was silvery grey, most likely made out of some precious metal, but it was hard to discern in a split second.

"Get it back! GET IT BACK!" Roman wailed, ordering his henchmen to achieve something that was frankly impossible. The Bullhead lurched forward, pulling further away from the object and Ruby. The studded sphere collided with Blake on her stomach, and the impact seemed to be the last straw in destabilizing it. The studded gems turned black, and Ruby could not quite describe the phenomenon other than that they emitted black light. The light soon turned into a swirling sphere, and it was as if space itself bent, buckled and broke along with it.

Ruby was right in the middle of everything. She could only hold onto Crescent Rose and Blake's soft body. Light swirled and scenery faded, and the shattered moon twisted when the sphere drew them deeper and deeper into it. Beyond the edge of the sphere, she could see Yang leaping into it feet-first, and Weiss being sucked into it hair-first.

Would this be the end?

What was going to happen?

The sputtering of the engine faded as well, and Ruby sank into a world of black silence.

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"Wait, what? You're choosing the Recon Corps?"

The day after the final day of training for the 104th Trainee Squad was bright and sunny. It was the last day of duties for the recruits. They would then elect a branch of the military to join; that would then decide their future. And at the moment, they were talking about just that while they scrub and maintain the cannons on top of Wall Rose.

The surprised question came from Eren Yeager, who had paused his scrubbing of the cannon barrel. He was a rather tall man, despite the fact that he was barely 15 years old. His teal-green eyes beneath his chestnut-colored bangs stared at the short man with a buzz-cut in front of him, who was squatting down and adjusting the gears on the base of the cannon beside his. On his hips, the complex piece of equipment named the "Three-Dimensional Maneuver Gear" hang quietly, only giving some complaints when he rubbed or brushed against it. The revelation came as a surprise to him: "Conny, you ranked eighth in the squad! Didn't you say that you were going to join the Military Police?"

"Well, yeah, that'd be nice, no doubt about it, but… you see…" The smaller man, Conny Springer, replied with some stutter before being interrupted by another recruit.

"Your little speech from yesterday worked, it seems." Thomas Wagner stood beside Eren. At a nice and impressive 5 foot 5 inches, he stood slightly shorter than Eren. He had a head of blond hair, trimmed and cut cleanly unlike Eren's head of disheveled chestnut. Only the top ten graduates in each batch of trainees were able to join the Military Police. Conny was the 8th, and Eren himself was the 5th.

"No! That ain't it…" Conny sputtered in what seemed to be embarrassment, but Eren could not tell due to the angle of Conny's face being in the shadows away from his sight, "well, it's 'cause… um… yeah, that's it! It's 'cause I can't stand being in the same squad as that guy! Yeah!"

"That doesn't explain how you want to join the Recon Corps instead," Thomas teased, his voice mocking the shorter guy. Conny's only response for that was a loud forced "shut up" to cover his lack of a clever retort.

"It isn't anything to be embarrassed about, you know," Thomas continued despite Conny's protest, scratching his chin as if there were something there that was bothering him. "You know what has to be done, but you can't find the courage to do it. It happens, and you're not the only one…"

Eren found the entire conversation between Conny and Thomas surprising to say the least. He still remembered the day when they chose to join the military. Conny was among many that were shameless enough to admit that they joined the military for a comfortable and rewarding life in the Military Police. That had to be part of the reason why only the top ten graduates had the opportunity to choose and join the Military Police, he thought; if the restriction was not there, there would definitely be a lot more who choose to join the Military Police. After all, their main activity was against those they should be protecting and not against who they should be fighting.

"That guy" that Conny was talking about was Jean Kirstein, ranking at the 6th out of the batch of recruits. As far as Eren knew, Jean's intentions to join the Military Police had never changed, nor would it ever change. He had always been a pessimist—or "realist", as he himself called it—and he had never thought about "throwing his life away against the enemy against which humanity had no chance of winning". A despicable man he was; besides, Eren never liked how he looked at Mikasa. He was about to say something, when a rather high-pitched voice panted: "Excuse me everyone, but…"

Eren turned around to see the 9th member of the top ten graduates, Sasha Blause. The brunette had her hair tied back into a pony tail as usual, but Eren found her excessive perspiration and panting strange. It was not a hot day, and on top of the wall it was even cooler with the wind, but Sasha for some reason seemed like she was exerting herself fairly recently, and there was a rather large bulge under her uniform jacket to his left.

"I stole some meat from the officer's supplies," the brunette said between pants, revealing the bundle of salted meat bound with strings under her jacket. Meat was a rare commodity inside the walls, because pastures and ranches took up way too much space and the humans could not afford to waste precious farmland to feed luxury items such as cattle. Only the most privileged and the richest echelons of the society would have access to meat, and even then it was not an item regularly present at their dinner tables.

The boys' jaws dropped simultaneously as they gaped at the brunette. In fact, everyone who saw her had their jaws firmly planted on the ground. There was a moment of silence on the walls. Nobody knew what to say at that. On the one hand, it was _meat_, something that they had only during festivals. On the other hand, if it were found out, not only would Sasha be in big trouble, everyone at the scene would be punished accordingly.

"What are you, stupid!?" Thomas was the one to break the silence. "Are you trying to get yourself locked in solitary confinement, Potato Girl!?"

"There ain't no brain inside that skull of hers!" Conny joined in.

"So incredibly idiotic it's kind of scary!" Another female recruit joined the conversation. She—Mina Carolina—had a head of black hair bound into two shoulder-long tails to the side and onyx black eyes. Indeed, there was about half a dozen recruits around Sasha then, and everyone was gaping at her reckless stupidity. But all of them were then salivating at the prospect of having meat.

Sasha was the most obvious one. She was blushing, her breathing was hard and heavy, and a small cloud of steam seemed to rise from her head. Ever since the first day of recruit training, she had earned the nickname "Potato Girl", when the Drill Sergeant found her eating a boiled potato while they were standing in formation for initiation. Upon being questioned, she had the audacity to split the potato in half and offer to share it with the Sergeant. It was, according to her, a rather generous gesture, and the recruits tended to believe her after she chose to run laps around the camp until she collapsed of exhaustion instead of missing lunch. At the moment, her saliva was dripping down her chin with each exhale, and Eren could not tell whether she giggled in euphoria or in delusion: "Ehehe, we can all share it later… slice it up, it between some bread… ehehehe…"

"Go put it back before anyone finds it missing!" Thomas almost yelled at Sasha. Instead, Potato Girl simply walked toward the crate of ammunition lying beside a cannon, opened it, and gently dropped the bundle of salted meat inside.

"We'll be fine," she said, closing the crate and patting the lid with her hand as if she were petting a puppy, "we'll be able to have plenty more cows and sheep when we recapture the land—"

It was then a dark sphere began to open above the group. There was a rather loud crackle and pop as it opened into a man-sized sphere, and then Eren found something landing on top of him as it was ejected by the sphere. He was a slender guy with not too bulky a build, and that something was soft and warm and human-sized. He collapsed on the ground, finding the mass suddenly on top of him, and then his head hit the top of the wall with a light thud.

"Ow," the object that landed on top of him groaned with a high-pitched voice. Eren could feel his stomach and innards squish under the weight. He was fairly certain that it was a person that landed on top of him, but given the mass, he could not stand up. Not only that, she had the audacity to wriggle her bum and crush his innards further!

"Could you please get up!?" Eren demanded, propping his upper torso up with his arms. The girl complied almost immediately, rolling off of him nimbly like a cat, and that was when he caught a glimpse of the whole situation. Thomas, Conny and Sasha each had a person land on them, and the blackened sphere was nowhere to be seen.

The girl that landed on top of him was wearing a black blouse with what seemed to be a corset, secured on her abdomen with crisscrossing black straps on top of dark red fabric. She was wearing a belt with a satchel and a cross to his left and some cylindrical objects in a belt to his right. Her skirt was likewise black with a red frilly edge, and her legs were covered with a translucent black fabric to below the knee, where a long pair of black leathery boots fastened with crisscrossing red straps covered her lower legs and her feet. She had a full head of straight dirty red hair and a pair of grey eyes. A hooded cloak was attached to her shoulder. Her strange attire was not the feature that attracted his attention, however. She was holding the largest scythe he had ever seen. It towered easily over him or the diminutive redhead when standing on its shaft, and if she had planted the blade down on the ground, he was pretty sure that the shaft when held parallel to the ground would be at shoulder level to the girl. The scythe was not made from a single piece of metal and a wooden shaft like a farming tool, either: it had obvious segments on its greyish blade, guarded by its red and black spine. On the other end of the scythe, there was a sharp bladed hook as well. There was a strange trapezoidal protrusion from the similarly segmented shaft, and there was a handle to the side whose purpose Eren could not fathom.

The other three arrivals were also dressed in outlandish gear. The girl that landed on top of Thomas was wearing an elegant bluish white dress, though the frilled end of the skirt only reached halfway down her thigh. It was fastened around her waist with white ribbons that fragmented into frills at the end. On her back there was a rather large satchel. She was wearing a short pair of boots with a V-shaped opening at the front. The tip of the shoes were white; an ornate piece of silver separated the tip from the rest of the shoe, which was watery blue and had rather sharp, high heels. The collar was azure on the outside and red on the inside, surrounding a small teardrop-shaped gem that adorned her neck on a necklace. She had absurdly long white hair tied into a side tail, draping as long as to the back of her knee. The tail was fastened with a piece of silver that frayed into jagged edges like a crystal of ice. She had a pair of penetrating blue eyes, and Eren could not help but draw his attention to the scar on her left eyelid. In her hand, there was a rapier as ornate as the rest of the girl's dress, with a rather bulgy crossguard that had a strange cylinder in the middle.

The girl that landed on top of Conny was a blonde, buxom babe. She had a head of gorgeous wavy hair that draped all the way down to her waist, and skin fair as the snow, though it was a healthy shade of slight pink instead of the white princess' paleness. Her eyes were amethyst purple: it was the first time Eren had ever seen someone with that eye color. Conny's head was unfortunate enough—or fortunate enough, depending how one looked at it—to be lodged between the considerable bulges on her chest, contained only by a daring low-cut shirt inside a rather brownish short-sleeved jacket. Her lower body was almost completely exposed save for a pair of incredibly short black shorts covering her hips, secured in place by a leather belt. Her shoes were leather boots similar to what Eren wore, but it was fastened with zippers instead of crisscrossing strings. Strangely, she did not seem to carry any weapon, though Eren did notice the matching golden bracelets she wore.

The last girl was unconscious and she landed with a soft thud on top of Sasha, unfortunately smashing the Potato Girl's face into the crate. What she wore was far less modest than the rest. Her theme was black and white, with what seemed like a generously cut-down tuxedo covering her outside with its twin tails. She wore a skin-tight white blouse inside, on the top and on the bottom, leaving her pale, firm belly exposed to the air. Her thigh-high black leather leggings were hoisted up by a pair of garter belts; on the side of her legs just below the edge of the legging, a white flame-like symbol that looked slightly like belladonna flowers was inscribed in rather glossy leather. Her shoes were shorter with short heels as well. She had wavy flowing black hair, adorned on the top with a black bow tie. On her back, there was something that looked like a sword but was not quite a sword; it had a slight curve to it, and its hilt and cross guard consisted of strange blocky shapes.

"Blake!" The red-haired girl yelled, dashing toward the black-haired woman and holding her up in her arms away from Sasha. Blake was coming to consciousness with a small moan, her eyelids slowly lifting to reveal amber, piercing eyes.

"Who are you?" Eren asked. They were obviously not from this world. Nobody they knew dressed like that, and given that the remnant of humanity was a pretty small number already, that was certainly proof enough. What was that dark sphere? Why were they dropped here?

The girls were as confused as everyone else. They were somewhat surprised, as well, because somehow they could understand Eren. "I'm Ruby Rose… where am I?" the redhead opened her mouth to answer that question and to follow up with questions of her own.

Standing in front of Ruby was a guy almost a head taller than she was. He had a head of chestnut-colored hair and piercing steel-grey eyes. He was wearing a rather simple drab-colored short jacket with a crest of crossed swords on top of a shield on the left breast pocket. Under that was a garment of a lighter drab color, secured in place with belts and buckles. Dark red cloth wrapped around his hip, secured in place with more belts and buckles. His pants were dull grey, and similarly secured in place with buckles and straps, all the way down to his knee, where his long, dark red boots began.

But his attire was not what caught her attention. He had a set of objects on his hips. It consisted of two rather bulky boxes on the side of the hip and a small drum-like object on the back. The boxes were rather long and had a cylinder of similar length resting on top. The cylinders were connected with a pair of loose handgrips with what seemed like hand brakes on top and triggers on the other side, and the barrel at the back with hoses.

"You're on top of Wall Rose," Eren rubbed his head and stood up, and Ruby did the same. "I am Eren Yeager of the 104th Trainee Squad, and—"

"NORA!" The white-haired girl let out a loud scream that made Eren's ears ring. And then, she stuttered and looked around, not at all concealing her shock: "Just… where are we right now?"

"Ow…" The blonde's reaction was far more subdued than Weiss'. Rubbing her head, she seemed to be in a state of shock before realizing her position. She was lying belly-to-belly against Conny, whose Maneuver Gear was pinching around her hips. Given how tall she was, Conny's face was precisely sandwiched between the soft mounds. The shorter boy's muffled cries were enough to get her to stand up with a spring: "Sorry about using you like a cushion."

"N-no, it's, uh… a-any time!" Eren had never seen the boy's face gain luminescence like that.

"Well, like I explained, you're on top of the outskirts of the town that we call the Trost District," Eren continued. At this point, it may be useful to just to get to know them, because despite their outlandish clothing and their behavior, they may be able to help the next time the enemy attacked. "We are recruits on the Fixed Cannon Maintenance Team Four, and today's our last day before we officially join the military."

"I see…" Yang chuckled a little as she rubbed the back of her head, "well, it's kind of obvious that we aren't in our world any more…"

"Yeah," Eren nodded. They were right above the gate on the southernmost point of Wall Rose. The enemies are known to be attracted to clusters of humans, but at the top of the Wall it should not be too dangerous. Still, there were way too many people gathered at the same spot for his comfort. He gestured toward Blake: "Is your friend okay?"

"I'm… okay," the black-haired girl mumbled and rubbed her eyes. Her voice was surprisingly mellow and gentle, nothing similar to Weiss' and Yang's. "Where are we? The last thing I remembered was being knocked out and…"

"You're safe now, Blake," Ruby cooed, smiling.

"Well, 'safe' would be a relative term," Thomas added, choosing to temporarily ignore Weiss' high-pitched lecture to Nora. "Beyond this wall lives the last remnants of humanity. Ever since five years ago when they breached Wall Maria…"

"Wall Maria?" Ruby walked to the edge of the wall and looked down. She stumbled back a couple of steps and almost fell; it was Blake who supported and stabilized her smaller frame. "Whoa!"

"Pretty tall, huh," Thomas smiled at Ruby. The Walls were at least 150 feet tall, and they were wide enough for the entire group to comfortably gather into a circle without fear of falling over. "This is the only thing standing between humanity and total annihilation, and it's been standing for over 100 years."

"This is amazing!" Ruby looked around. The wall was lined with railway tracks both front and back, on top of which lay fixed cannons with adjustable base. The cannons were positively ancient looking: they were not rifled at all, and their bore was big enough to fit a human head into it. Beside the base of each cannon there was an ammunition crate that stored some amount of propellant and shells. The breech of each cannon can open as demonstrated by the cannon beside Sasha. The entire system was laid out as far as the eye can see, and the wall curved gently to the north when Ruby was facing the sun.

"Well, just having the wall isn't enough," Eren added, standing beside Blake and Ruby with his hands on his hips. "One day, humanity will strike back, and we'll exterminate those bastards and retake our land."

"Those bastards? Who are you talking about—" Suddenly, there was a bright orange flash of light. Then, a long, ominous shadow cast over Ruby and the group. The moment she turned her head, she saw the most terrifying thing in the world.

In front of her was a gigantic, flayed human face, resting on shoulders wide and thick enough to be considered walls on their own. The skull itself was at least twenty feet tall by her estimates; its nose was as tall as a cannon propped up vertically. Its eyes were comparatively small, but it was glaring down at Ruby as if it considered her as nothing but a snack. Its lips had no skin on it, leaving its teeth exposed; they extended far back into the head, and each one could easily be as wide as a human arm. Because there was no lips, it was as if it was smiling, mocking the humans for their "marvel of engineering".

There was a split second of silence as the recruits regarded the giant face in shock. Weiss held her breath; Yang directed her attention toward the giant, and her jaw was just about to drop to the floor. The entire world stood still as steam wafted from around the giant face.

The Titans were back.


	2. Chapter 2

Author's Note:

1. Please don't beg for updates. I will only release a chapter when I consider it ready. Usually I hold a chapter in reserve; it will not be released until I think it's good for release.

2. For those who expect that Titans die in droves, you will have to wait. Much exposition and development is in order.

3. I'm also looking for a beta reader for a second opinion. If you're interested, let me know through PM or reviews. You get to see one chapter in advance!

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Scalding steam crashed into Ruby's face as she was blown off of her footing and past the wall's inner edge. She almost let go of Crescent Rose when the steam seared her hand, but she was glad that she did not. In the middle of freefall, she reacted quickly, firing a round behind her to propel her toward the vertical surface of the wall and then lodged the tip of Crescent Rose into the hard, white surface. The blade found purchase after sliding a few feet down, and she spent almost all her energy hanging onto the shaft of the scythe.

She heard Eren yell "switch to Three-Dimensional Maneuver", and then she saw the recruits springing to action. They used the boxy objects on their hips to launch grappling hooks; the hooks were apparently launched with sufficient force that they lodged into the wall, and the taut steel wires suspended all of them on the wall's vertical surface.

And then Ruby caught sight of Blake, Weiss and Yang. Despite having just recently woken up, Blake's movements were clean, simple and effective. She launched her sword—Gambol Shroud—with surgical precision at Ruby's diminutive form, wrapping it around her waist before extending the blade to allow it to lodge firmly inside the wall like Crescent Rose. This reduced Ruby's stress and allowed Blake to suspend off of Ruby with less effort than it would normally require, but Ruby's grip still almost slipped. Weiss, on the other hand, hopped from glyph to glyph before she caught Yang with her arms, and then with another series of agile hops came to cling to a blue glyph on the wall.

"What… what was that thing!?" Ruby yelled at Eren, who happened to suspend just a little below her. Everything happened so quickly that she could not collect her thoughts. In the middle of the question, however, a body dropped past her; it was one of the recruits, and from the blood on his face he was probably struck on the head.

"Samuel!" Eren had no time to answer Ruby's question. He reached for his comrade to grab him, but he was a couple inches too far and missed Samuel's jacket. And then, there was a blur between Eren and Ruby: Sasha sprinted vertically on the wall downwards.

Sasha clenched her teeth and let out a high-pitched grunt of exertion as she leaped away from the wall in a seemingly suicidal charge. Angling her body toward Samuel, she launched one of her grappling anchors, and then she twisted her body to launch her second one up toward the surface of the wall. The downward anchor found Samuel in his boots, piercing the bottom of his sole and shooting clean through it before it stopped and lodged into the leather. The upward anchor found the wall, and the wire snapped taut, landing Sasha onto the wall itself. "Samuel! Don't let go, you hear me!?" Sasha's cry was almost hysterical as Samuel's unconscious body swung around, and she was desperate to keep him from hitting the wall and becoming a bloody smear on it.

Maneuvering in such a manner was suicidal, to say the least. Without the aid of Dust, humanity in this world found an amazing way to move around, Ruby thought. The power of Dust allowed humanity in her world Remnant to achieve supernatural feats with little disapproval from the laws of physics, but Eren and the recruits had not that luxury. Her train of thought was quickly disrupted, however, when a sharp explosion rumbled through the wall. A cloud of dust and smoke billowed upward from below them; that was where the gate was. The enormous cracks and fissures around the gate, however, signified its current status; it was no longer there, smashed by some force it simply could not withstand.

The gate was destroyed.

Ruby saw Eren's eyes widen. There was a mix of emotions there to be sure, but Ruby had no time, mood, or expertise to read them, not to mention that those things were there only for a brief moment before the lights in his eyes turned into grim determination.

"They've broken through the wall!" That was Thomas.

"It's happening again! The Titans are coming in!" Conny was equally panicked and steeped in despair. "Fuck… We're really all going to die!"

"No! This can't be happening…"

Ruby glanced around at the recruits. Most of them have sagged shoulders. Some were regarding the breach with stunned expressions, and others had tears streaming on their faces. For what she assumed to be military, they were quite weak-willed; but then again, they were only recruits and not seasoned soldiers who had seen real action. Eren's face was different, however. There was a glint of what could be described as recognition to her, but it quickly disappeared. Instead, his eyes were burning with a fire that she had never seen. It was as if the destruction of the gate woke something inside him, and the grinding of his teeth was almost audible.

What happened in his life that resulted in such a drastic difference of expression from the rest of them?

"Ruby!" Blake climbed up with her ribbon, and was then just a stone's throw from Ruby, "I've no idea what's going on, but we've got to help these people!"

"Help!? Are you kidding? We don't even know who we're up against!" Weiss used her glyphs to hop over to where Ruby was, with Yang on her back. "And we don't even know if Dust actually exists in this world! What if in the middle of a fight we run out of Dust!? We don't know how to use the gear that they have!"

"They are also giant, clumsy targets!" Yang gushed at the shapes just emerging from the billowing cloud of smoke. Ruby could barely make them out, as well. Giant, humanoid shadows walked through the gate with lumbering, slow gait. Some fell into the trenches and tried to get out, while others simply walked across the wooden bridge over the trenches. Most of them were definitely bigger than an Ursa, and some of them were even taller, but unlike the mostly animalistic Grimm that they were used to seeing, all of them looked disturbingly human.

"Sasha!" Ruby was about to speak when Eren's voice snapped her attention to him. At the same time, the recruits' attention were also directed to Eren, as if his voice had some kind of commanding power. Despite the chaos and destruction below, on the walls of Trost around them there was but silence.

"You take care of Samuel! Fixed Cannon Maintenance Team Four, get ready for battle!" Eren continued with grim determination, his grip on the handles of his blades tight. Ruby found that the blades were like snap-off blades, with etched ridges dividing the blade into sections. "Our target is that Colossal Titan! Now's our chance!"

"'Now's our chance', he says!" Weiss' objections were intentionally quiet enough that only the four of them could hear. "What could he possibly do against something that big?"

Even then, Eren was retracting his wires and sprinting upwards on the wall. "That big sucker there is the only one that could reach over the walls! We can't let it get away! We have to put it down!" He shouted without looking back, his jacket fluttering in the wind. The recruits nodded to each other, and each one of them began their climb with him.

Ruby sighed and closed her eyes for a moment before she opened them again, her heart set on a course: "We might not know what we're walking into, but we can't let these people die here. Besides, what would happen to us if these… these Titans succeed? For all we know, they wouldn't distinguish between the people of this world and us. And if these people fall, how are we going to get back to Vale?"

"Right!" Blake agreed with a nod and a smile.

"What about Dust? Without Dust, we can't do anything!"

"Well, we'll just have to conserve what we have and find out whether or not it exists after all this is over," Ruby looked at the white princess. "So, are you with me?"

"I'm with you!" Yang offered unconditionally. Her sister had always been supportive.

"Well, I guess," Weiss hesitated for moment, before stabbing her rapier into the wall and turning off the blue circle. "But don't expect me to follow your orders, you get that?"

"Yeah, yeah." With a nod and a smile, Ruby saw a blue circle appear under her, followed by a string of similar circles line on the wall. At the same time, Blake let out a grunt and flew up, running up the wall with the circles as support. Dislodging Crescent Rose from the wall, Ruby did the same, and from her peripheral vision, Yang was following closely behind. The string of glyphs were smaller than before, and each one of them disappeared moments after Weiss herself set her foot on them. Using this ability would consume Dust, after all. By the moment Ruby ascended to the top of the wall, she found Eren standing on top with his swords drawn, and he was staring down the Colossal Titan.

"Hey there, you son of a bitch; haven't seen you in five years," Eren snarled, his smile vicious and his eyes thirsting for its blood. "I missed you. Did you miss me?"

The Colossal Titan gave no answer. Instead, it rose its hand and started sweeping across the top of the wall. It brushed aside cannons, crates, and rails; the hand was like a moving wall, heading toward the group of people like a bulldozer tearing up rubble. Eren hopped off the edge and launched the hooks into the upper arm of the Titan before flying upwards, landing on top of the arm and sprinting toward its shoulder.

"What the hell!?" The moment Ruby saw the hand coming, she grabbed Yang by the collar and leaped, firing Crescent Rose downwards to generate thrust. Blake leaped as well, coiling Gambol Shroud onto Ruby's arms as the red-headed girl gave a firm tug to drag her comrade to safety. Ember Celica—Yang's shotgun fists—shot in the same direction as Crescent Rose, giving the trio a lurch when the Titan swept under them. Weiss, on the other hand, was almost hit by the hand. She drew considerably smaller glyphs on the hand itself and sprinted on top of it while it moved until she could vault over it. The four of them landed onto the broken gravel that used to be the top of the wall, trying to discern what happened.

"This is insane!" Weiss complained. "We're not equipped to deal with something on this scale! We don't even know if our attacks are going to hurt it!"

"I know!" Yang shouted over the commotion. "Let's go in after him! He probably knows how to hurt it—Ruby WAIT!"

"YAAH!" With a battlecry, Ruby leaped over the edge of the wall as well, Crescent Rose having transformed into its scythe form. With three shots she accelerated herself almost to the speed of a bullet. In a red blur she zipped across the gap between the edge of the wall and the Titan's shoulder, and then she came to a stop by planting Crescent Rose deep into the Titan's flesh. Surprisingly, the Colossal Titan showed no expression of pain; indeed, it showed hardly any expression of noticing Ruby's attack on it at all.

"That idiot!" Weiss let out an impotent cry as she witnessed Ruby's acrobatics. "What happens if she falls off of that!? I'm not wasting Dust on her this time!"

The Colossal Titan's eyes followed Eren first, and then it fixated on Ruby. There was a moment when their eyes met, and Ruby could have sworn that there was a glint of something in the giant's eyes. Then, its arms moved, and Ruby had to hop along to maintain her traction on the slippery muscles. On the other hand, Eren sprinted along the arm until he almost lost his footing, and then launched his grappling hooks into the Titan's shoulder near the collar bone.

"Here I come!" Ruby mustered a bellow as she too headed for the Titan's collar bone. Without a solid physical connection to the Titan's flesh like Eren did, she nonetheless sprinted with sure footing as if she were going out for a run. Even if the Colossal Titan was moving, it was not moving at great speed. Hefting Crescent Rose like a balancing pole for tightrope walkers, she leaped and skipped when her footing were insecure, landing always with a grin on her face.

"Too slow!" Eren let out a battle cry as he reeled in his wires. With his hands raised and his swords poised, he flew straight toward the back of the Titan's neck. "You're mine, you son of a bitch!"

"Is that where you hit them?" Blake observed as Eren flew in for the kill. The other recruits were on the wall as well, but they too were observing instead of charging in for the kill. "What about the other areas?"

"Yeah, you… you have to carve out the nape of their neck. It's a small… small area on the back of their necks, about one meter in length and ten centimeters in width…" stammered Conny, whose hands were shaking slightly, "they regenerate too quickly if you cut them in other places…"

"That's an awfully small area for something that big!" Yang gaped again. Then, her field of vision was obscured with billowing clouds of hot white steam. "What the… now I can't see!"

"Ow! Ow! Hot! Hot! Hoooot!" Ruby screamed as she jumped off the Titan's arm. There was nowhere else for her to go; the steam was so hot that there was certainly going to be burns on her exposed skin later.

"I'm falling!" There was nowhere where she could land her foot and she was too far from the wall; Eren was too far to offer any help, and he had his heart set on killing the Colossal Titan. It was then that a black blur flew toward the diminutive redhead, and she felt something wrapping around her waist. The ribbon that connected Gambol Shroud to Blake's wrist went taut for a second, and then Ruby was abruptly pulled upwards by the elasticity of the band. She fired two shots below her, and that propelled her over the edge of the wall. Her landing was rather rough; there was little chance that she could have adjusted her posture in mid-air, but she did so anyway and landed in a roll that came to a stop in a rather indignant posture with her butt against a broken portion of the wall and her legs pointing toward the sky.

Blake retracted Gambol Shroud and extended the blade before sheathing it. She turned around and found the recruits staring at her with their mouths open. With a light sigh, she turned to the Titan, only to find that only the open fields outside the walls could be seen. In a cloud of steam and mist, the Titan seemed to have disappeared. "Does this happen often?" She asked Thomas, who was standing beside her.

"No… not at all," Thomas could only manage to give a short answer before Eren emerged onto the top of the wall. "Eren! Did you kill it? What happened?"

"I didn't! It disappeared! Just like five years ago!" The chestnut-haired man gave a frustrated growl. "It comes along, destroys the fixed defenses and the gate, and then it disappears! Damn it!"

"Oi! We ain't got time to dally about here!" Conny suddenly found his strength somehow. "The wall's been breached! We've got to seal that hole!"

"'Seal that hole', he says! How the hell are they supposed to seal a hole that big?" Weiss mumbled under her breath. The bells in the town had already started to toll. Then, the white-haired heiress turned to Ruby, who was just standing up. She put her hands on her hips and bent down, aiming her anger at the red girl: "And you! The next time you charge into something that dangerous without so much as using your brain, don't expect anyone to help you, you understand that!?"

"What are you trainees doing here!?" A man, much older than the youthful faces around Weiss and company, rose to the top of the wall. He was armed with the same boxy 3D Maneuver Gear as the trainees, and he was wearing the same brown jacket, beige undershirt and white pants that the trainees wore, though the emblem on the chest pocket of his jacket was a shield with roses inside instead of two crossed swords. "And who the hell are these girls?!"

"Sir!" The recruits stood at attention with their left hand behind their back and their right hand clenched into a fist over their hearts. Yang and Blake helped Ruby up, and they gathered around Weiss. "We don't know, sir!"

"Whatever!" The man dismissed, and Ruby let out a relieved sigh. At this moment, if they spent any more time discussing their situation, the Titans could very well enter in greater numbers than before. "The special strategy has already been initiated! Assume your positions! Whoever made contact with that monstrosity, report to the inner garrison at once! And get the damn civvies out of here!"

"Sir, yes sir! We shall pray for the vanguard's success!"

Without another word, the older man and his companions hopped off the edge of the wall. Ruby turned to Eren and Conny and saw the two boys—men, Ruby corrected herself, they were men—visibly relax. She walked toward them while retracting Crescent Rose into its carrying form and hanging it onto her belt. She understood, finally, what those boxes and the swords were for: "So, what's going to happen now?"

"We're going to head to the garrison at the rear of the town and join everyone else in our squad. Can you fight?" Eren offered Ruby a stiff half smile when he asked. Given the situation, Ruby could not blame him. He scratched the back of his head and averted his eyes to the side when he continued: "Well, I can understand if you can't or don't want to help… in that case, you should join the rest of the townsfolk and evacuate into the main wall…"

"The Titans would die if we slice open their necks at this spot, right?" Ruby patted the nape of her neck with a nervous chuckle. "We might not be experienced, but we could… try to help, you know…"

"Come with me, then!"

* * *

Mikasa Ackerman walked briskly in the courtyard of the Inner Garrison. Recruits and soldiers alike scurried about ever since the bells tolled. Most of them were carrying supplies and weapons, and all of them were armed with Maneuver Gear. She always had her own Gear gassed and ready, because there was no telling when it would come in handy.

"Recruits! You've passed your final exams! That makes you all full-fledged soldiers! We have great hopes for you!" Her attention lingered for a brief second on a member of the Garrison who was attempting to raise the morale by shouting over the commotion, and then it wandered to her surroundings. She was searching for someone; she could not afford to split her attention on things that mattered little to her.

And, it was apparent that, despite the words of encouragement and the ideas of high expectations, the bitter desperation in the air was a fixture that had come to stay at the garrison. Ever since the Titans entered the picture, humanity had been fighting a losing war. The Walls—Wall Maria, Wall Rose, and Wall Shina—were erected a century ago to stave off Titan incursions, closing off in concentric circles a small patch of land in the vast continent to form a sanctuary for human life. It remained as such until five years ago when the Colossal Titan appeared over Wall Maria. Shiganshina District at the southernmost point of Wall Maria, along with the Wall itself, were breached on that day, ceding almost a third of human-controlled territory to the Titans. Humanity was not prepared for such a sudden assault; as a result, food stockpiles were strained to the breaking point, and the king chose to sacrifice one in five people—young, old, women, men—in a futile attempt to retake the Wall. Two hundred and fifty thousand of them journeyed out in a massive expedition; only less than a hundred would return.

Since the day Titans appeared, humanity had never once tasted victory over them. Defeat after bloody defeat struck terror into the psyche of the common man. It taught them that, whatever they did, it was a futile struggle against the Titans, who lorded over them and herded them into the Walls like livestock. Before the breach of Wall Maria, humans thought that they could hide behind the walls, recoup, recover, and one day take on the Titans and slaughter them. Five years ago, that was proven tragically wrong with a payment of blood.

Mikasa lost everyone but Eren and Armin that day. They watched as Eren's mother was eaten, but being children, they had little power to change that. Three years of gruesome training later, however, all of them were forged into soldiers—nay, into Titan hunters.

They were no longer helpless. They were no longer powerless.

The prey had become the predator.

The though loitered in Mikasa's mind for a moment. Her eyes darted around the crowd of people, trying to identify Eren's familiar silhouette. There was Jean Kirstein, Eren's rival and 6th in the graduation roster. Mikasa had a vague recollection of him, mainly of his fights against Eren in the mess hall. He was a coward who openly stated that he wanted to join the Military Police for a life of safety and comfort inside Wall Shina and, as expected, his face was green with terror. His friend Marco Bolt was with him; Mikasa had little recollection of the plain, freckle-faced man, but he looked much more composed than Jean was. There was Krista Lenz, the blonde diminutive girl who ranked 10th in the graduation roster of the 104th Trainee Squad. She was comforting Daz, who had been clutching his own chest and stomach ever since the bell tolled. They were among those who had completed the preparations.

Mikasa changed her direction toward the supply depot. Eren had to be there if he was not amongst those who had completed their preparations, she thought. Sure enough, she found him sitting on a bench with a quivering Armin by his side, charging their gas cylinders. The moment Mikasa focused her attention on him, however, she could hear a light and erratic clatter of metal colliding against metal.

"Eren—" She called out, but her sentence was interrupted. Eren gripped Armin by the shoulder and shook the blonde boy, and it was then that Mikasa noticed the shaking of Armin's hands. The metal clatter was from the wrench in his hand colliding against the lip of the gas cylinder. Her eyes widened slightly at the sight. Armin had always been the more introverted and less assertive of the trio, but she did not think that even he could be terrified to such a degree.

"Get a hold of yourself!" Eren shouted into Armin's ears. Mikasa saw the boy jump visibly, his bottom leaving his seat for a brief moment before gravity yanked it down again.

"I-I'm going to be okay! I-I-It'll settle down soon enough!" Armin replied in a similar volume, though it was more for his own reassurance than to make his answer heard. The shaking of his hands subsided enough for him to finally mate the hose to his gas bottle and tighten the seal, though he looked every bit as green as Jean was: "But t-t-this is trouble! We have an eight-meter-tall hole at the gate! And with the T-T-Titans coming in, there's not enough time to fix it! We didn't even dig out the rock we intended to block off the entrance!"

Mikasa remembered the giant rock that remained half-buried near the entrance of the Trost District. The first time she patrolled there, she mistook it for a small hill, but it was, as she was later told, a massive chunk of solid, hard rock that was easily ten meters across. To dig it out would be a gigantic effort. To move it would be another colossal undertaking requiring manpower and, more importantly, time. With the district under siege already, and with Titans spilling into the gate like a tidal wave, there was no way that it could be done.

"With the hole there, they could just stroll in any time!" The boy continued, even when Mikasa and even Eren realized the gravity of the situation. "This town would be abandoned, and the Titans would have direct access to Wall Rose! They would be able to breach it any time like they did to Wall Maria five years ago! They'll just come in and eat us all any time they please—!"

His wrench slipped out of its socket. The bottle hissed lightly as pressurized gas escaped, but Eren quickly put a firm hand to the bottle and tightened it: "Get a hold of yourself! We're going to be all right! Remember what we went through for the past three years? Finally we'll be able to use that! Finally we can stick it to the Titans!"

"Y-Yeah…" Armin gave Eren a small awkward smile. "Sorry about that… I'm-I'll be fine…"

"Of course you will! Don't be silly!" Eren grinned reassuringly, patting the boy on his shoulder. "We have help this time, too! Remember the girls I told you about that just 'appeared' on the wall?"

"I still have a hard time believing you," Armin responded with a nervous chuckle.

Girls appearing on the wall? What was he talking about? Mikasa's eyes widened a little: "Eren, what was that about?"

"Ah, Mikasa!" Eren continued, sparing a short glance at Mikasa before getting up and shutting off the gas valve on the giant cylinders against the wall. "I saw the most incredible thing this morning! We were cleaning the cannons, and this black sphere just opened up right above us and spat out four outlandishly-dressed girls with really, really strange weapons! One girl had a red thing that she could transform into this huge scythe taller than she was, and another girl could draw shapes in mid-air and jump from them!"

"Eren, did you hit your head?" Mikasa walked closer to him and placed her hands on his head, checking for possible cracks or bleeding wounds.

Eren shook off her hands with a jerk of his head and turned around, seemingly hurt: "Mikasa! I never hit my head on anything! Are you trying to say that I'm delusional!?"

"Even Mikasa was mocking you!" Armin's expression finally brightened into a small smile. "Were you daydreaming again?"

"Conny, Thomas and Mina were there too! They saw everything! And Sasha!" Eren's retort was rather indignant. "Mikasa, that was mean! Have I ever lied to you guys?"

"I'm sorry," the girl answered with a small sigh. The tension before the battle bled away completely; her shoulder visibly sagged in a more relaxed stance, and the corner of her lips curled upwards a little.

"They're still around! I'll lead you guys to them after all this—"

"Recruits! ASSEMBLE!" The commander bellowed. Armin panicked a little, but he managed to disengage the canister properly. All of the recruits—more than two hundred of them—gathered in the courtyard of the Garrison after about a minute. They stood at attention and saluted the commander, putting their fists over their hearts and holding their heads up high.

"You know the drill! Split up to your assigned passages! Obey the order of regular Garrison members!" The commander, Captain Kitts Verman, was an imposing man in his 40s. With a thick head of brown hair, a well-groomed mustache and a full chin of similarly well-trimmed beard, he was rather clean and kempt for a soldier. Despite that, Mikasa could see something different about him. His eyes had sunk deep within their sockets, casting a shadow over his eyes, and it was in those eyes that Mikasa saw.

Fear.

She could hear the slight quiver in his voice and see the small twitches in his facial muscles. What he said was unimportant; these slight variations attracted her full attention. They were subtle, and he was trying desperately to hide then, but they were there. It was a commander's duty to appear dauntless regardless of their personal emotions, and if it was not that duty binding him, Mikasa was certain that he would have been reduced to a slobbering mess like Daz.

"…as you are all aware, cowardice is punishable by execution without further questioning. You're sacrificing yourselves to save the people of Trost. Make your lives count." The courtyard fell completely silent upon the utterance of those words. Mikasa's attention wandered back to her surroundings. The silence was not absolute; there was the slight shiver, the light tremble, the uneasy shudder; she could hear them all.

"Dismissed!"

"SIR, YES SIR!" The response from the recruits were unanimous on the surface. Down in her heart, Mikasa knew better. The moment the Captain and his aides turned around and left, she spun in place and sprinted toward Eren, who was standing not far from her in the rear of the square.

Jean was bending over and clutching his stomach, trying desperately not to throw up. He looked greener than before; perhaps it was because of the announcement on the treatment of cowards. Marco was still with him, patting him on his back to try and calm him down. On the other hand, Daz's vomit had become simple liquids. At this rate, he would hurl his stomach out of his mouth before he ever went into battle. But he was not Mikasa's concern at the moment.

"Eren," she said, reaching the chestnut-haired man standing beside Armin, "if it gets chaotic, come and find me."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Eren's eyes widened. "Did you trip over something and hit yourself on the head? We're on different teams, you know!"

"Yeah, but plans fall apart! When that happens, I'll protect you!"

The moment of silence from Eren was precious. He almost recoiled under Mikasa's stare. Pursing his lips, he gave him a stern stare: "C'mon, we're all going to be all right. We'll win this time, so—"

"Mikasa Ackerman!" A gruff voice came from behind, and Mikasa instinctively turned around. She recognized the face immediately: Ian Dietrich, the captain of the Rear Guard and of the same rank as Kitts Verman, was calling for her by name. Snapping to attention automatically, her body tensed as she waited for his instructions.

"You're coming with me to the rear guard." The words were as rocks tied to her feet when she was about to be thrown into a river. The rear guard consisted of the most elite of all Garrison forces in Trost. They were the last line of defense against the Titans, and the indomitable shield protecting the evacuating civilians. To be accepted into the rear guard instead of being assigned with the rest of the recruits should be considered an incredible honor, but at the moment Mikasa's ears were buzzing with shock.

"Sir! With all due respect, I'm just going to slow everyone down!" She snapped a rejection without a second thought. The rear guard, incidentally, would have the highest probability of survival. The recruits and the less-elite of the Garrison were assigned to more forward positions and could absorb the brunt of the Titan attack with their lives while whittling down their number, so it could be that the rear guard would not encounter a lot of action at all.

What was more, Eren was not asked to join the rear guard.

"This isn't a suggestion; it's an order." Captain Dietrich replied, not even waiting for Mikasa to finish before he turned around and left. "You're needed in the rear guard. We're gathering on the roof outside the Garrison. Come join us in five minutes."

"But sir—!" Mikasa almost bit her tongue when Eren grabbed her by her scarf and smashed his forehead into hers. The shock and the force made her grunt and wince.

"Shut it!" Eren yelled at her. Mikasa shrunk visibly under his glare. "We're being driven extinct! There's no time for your selfish nonsense!"

"Y-Yeah… Sorry…" She apologized, her voice buzzing quietly like a cricket. "But… can you promise me one thing?"

"What is it?"

"…don't die," Mikasa said softly. And then, she shook off Eren's hand and sprinted off.

"… I won't."

* * *

Ruby stood on the roof of a two-story building just outside the larger structure that was the military garrison. She was in no mood to admire the ancient, ornate architecture that composed the District of Trost. The silhouettes of the Titans were barely visible in the direction of the gate. Although the gigantic humanoid creatures had breached the gate, they were moving fairly slowly toward the north of the district. Below them at ground level, streams of people joined into a sea of waves, crowding the streets leading toward the inside of the taller wall. Although soldiers were maintaining order, people were panicking and running for their lives. Most of them brought little luggage with them as expected; the Titans hardly gave any of them time to pack their valuables, after all.

Blake and Weiss were standing on different rooftops. Yang instead picked the steeple of a church not far away, and was then holding on to the lightning pole on top of it. Ruby sighed and unhooked Crescent Rose from her back. She had never fought against opponents the size of Titans, and with her current supply of Dust—around sixty rounds' worth—she did not know if she could keep fighting for too long.

The town—Trost District, as Eren called it—was arranged in a rather orderly fashion. It was obviously not built organically from human settlements, but the fruit of a planned construction effort. The houses were varied, but only superficially, and they occupied rectangular lots divided by roads. Each block could have dozens of families living in it, attesting to the population density of the town. There were markets, stalls and plazas, but those were small and they dotted the town in regular intervals.

Eren had asked them to stay outside of the garrison. After the gate had been breached, every second counted. Civilians needed to be evacuated to the inner wall, and the military was going to fight the enemy to buy time for the evacuation. There was no time for silly and unrelated questions regarding their origins, he said. He sounded pretty grim when he said that, too, Ruby recalled. Fighting against enemies of that size had to be intimidating.

"I'm still not sure about that crazy idea of yours. I mean, the only way to kill these things are to carve out chunks of them from the back of their neck, and I don't think any one of us are equipped to do that," said Weiss, who hopped to Ruby's position. With a light tug, she pulled her satchel from the back to the front and opened it. Six small vials of powdered Dust was in the satchel, capped by cork stoppers.

"I know…" Ruby shook her head and extended Crescent Rose into its scythe form. The blade inside the sectioned arm glinted under the sun. "But what else can we do?"

"Finding out how we got here would be a good start," Weiss sighed and shifted her satchel back. "What happened when that black thing swallowed us?"

"I don't know, but I saw some device slip out of that Bullhead and… then the black thing came out," Ruby scratched her head. "I've never heard of any device in our world that could do that."

"Of course not," Weiss dismissed matter-of-factly, addressing Ruby as if she were an idiot. "Dust may be powerful, but I've yet to hear it break the fundamental law of physics. The device had simply too unusual an effect. I wonder… Can it be something left over from the past?"

"Arguing about the device's origin isn't going to help us." Blake joined the discussion, having just arrived at Ruby's side through a series of jumps. "We need to find out how to get back to Vale, and these people are the best chance for us to do that. And they are apparently under the threat of giant humanoid monsters."

"Have you seen the cannons that they had on the walls? I bet they're just smoothbore cannons firing iron shots. Even if the humongous guy didn't destroy them, I doubt they're effective against the Titans. The nape of the neck is an awfully small area to hit from the front and smoothbore cannons tend to be inaccurate at a distance so it's kind of surprising that they had the technology to create the boxy gear for soldiers to move and jump as they please but not rifled barrels and fully self-contained cartridges…"

"Oh, please, give your inner weapon maniac a rest, would you? We need to think about our situation more than what the humans in this world have."

"But I am thinking about our situation," Ruby was exasperated that Weiss could not see her line of reasoning. "See, the gear that they're using, it's got to be unwieldy. Balancing your own weight on a pair of wires is hard. It doesn't matter how skilled the soldiers are; they're fighting opponents a thousand times their size, and the system isn't going to help them much. If the big guys are as nimble as a human is, then to them these soldiers—and we—are going to be like flies!"

"You remember the square-cube law, don't you?" Weiss rolled her eyes. Placing her hands on her hip, she leaned forward, staring at Ruby like a teacher educating a misbehaving kid. "And, you know how difficult it is for us to swat a fly. As long as the giants don't know how to use a fly swatter, their movements are going to be very, very visible. If these guys are skilled enough to balance themselves with a pair of wires, killing these giants shouldn't be a problem for them, so they might not need our help!"

"I wouldn't be so sure." Folding her hands in front of her chest, Blake interjected much to Weiss' chagrin. "The buzzcut guy—I think his name is Conny—said that they were all going to die. They didn't sound too confident."

"He looked like a dumb coward to me! Besides, they were the recruits, right? It's probably the first time he's seen real action; didn't we all panic a little during our first fight with a Grimm?"

"Yeah, but these guys didn't have Dust-powered weapons, the protection of our Aura, or the abilities our Semblance give us, you know? These guys are fighting against monsters with nothing but their swords, their gear and their flesh and blood. Don't they deserve some help?"

"I'm not saying that we shouldn't help them, Blake. All I'm saying is that they've handled themselves so far, and they've been fighting these things a lot longer than we have. Our powers may not make up for the difference in skill, and if we die here…"

"Girls, the fireworks are starting." Yang leaped off of the steeple and landed on Ruby's rooftop with a thud and a roll. "It looks like they're trying to get the civilians away from the combat areas. The soldiers are just going in to delay the Titans and buy time for the evacuation."

"This apparent lack of confidence is all the more reason to help them," Blake stated in her quiet manner. She unhooked Gambol Shroud from her back and drew the blade, keeping its sharp scabbard in her off hand. "After this is over, we could talk with whoever's in charge to get a sense of the situation."

Ruby nodded. There would be a time and a place to debate the issue, but they had not the luxury of time for banter. She glanced down at the streets and the people pushing and shoving each other just to be a couple steps closer to the gate. This was not what she hoped for when she thought about another world. A barren hill of swords, blades, bolters, and other outlandish weapons, maybe, but not somewhere where people were fleeing for their lives from giant monsters that looked disturbingly like humans.

"Hey guys," Yang waved, seemingly delighted to see Eren and his squad. They landed on the same rooftop and suddenly the place had become much more crowded. They were all holding swords with blades shaped like snap-off knives, with handles that contained triggers. "All dressed up and ready to go?"

Ruby could make out Thomas and Mina in addition to Eren, but the other three people she did not recognize, and she did not see either Conny or Sasha in the crowd. There was a blonde boy with striking blue eyes, eyes clear enough that she could almost see his soul. There were two other men with chestnut and grey hair; those two were not anything special in her eyes. All of them had a solemn look on their faces. Even Mina, the fair lady among the bunch of young men, was frowning, her thin black eyebrows tied into a knot. Perhaps it was the pre-battle nervousness that was getting to them, Ruby thought.

Eren nodded. The three guys unfamiliar to Ruby gave her a curious look for a brief moment. The blond boy was fidgeting a little; if it were not for the gear and the uniform, Ruby would have thought him out of place here. "Let's keep the introduction short. You already know Mina and Thomas. This is Armin, Nac and Mylius, my other teammates," he gestured to the blonde boy, the grey-haired man and the chestnut-haired man in sequence.

"Ruby," she responded with a small smile. The blond boy regarded them with some curiosity, but when his eyes met Ruby's, he shirked away somewhat. He could not be older than she was, she thought. In fact, if they were trained together, probably none of them was over the age of 16. If the humans of this world were turning teenagers like them into soldiers, it certain was a statement of how desperate they were.

"Weiss."

"Blake."

"Yang. Nice to meet you all."

"We're assigned to the middle guard," Eren continued. Pointing toward the center of the town with his sword, his smile grew a little. "Our mission is to support the vanguard. Follow us; I'll brief you all on the way."

* * *

How the piece of equipment Eren called the "Three-Dimensional Maneuver Gear" operated had been made apparent to Ruby during the time they travelled. The triggers on the handles fired metal wires with solid anchors. The mechanism that looked like wire brake was instead a mechanism for the retraction of the metal wires that the barrel would fire around the hips of the operator. When the handles were pressed, Ruby assumed that gas would be vented through holes in the back and that would then drive some mechanism in the barrel to retract the wires with enough force to tug the operator along their intended path. The bulky box under the cylinders seemed to store the disposable blades for the operator. The disposable blades were interesting themselves. The reason for them, Ruby thought, was because the flesh of a Titan would be rather hard to cut and the quality of the metal they used could not handle more than a few cuts. If that was indeed the case, Crescent Rose would probably need sharpening after a few Titan kills as well.

The position of the vulnerable areas of a Titan was also rather interesting. Ruby knew little of Titan physiology, but that was where the most vulnerable spot for the spinal cord lay for humans. It could be a coincidence, Ruby thought; vertebrates usually had a vulnerability in their spinal cord, and that was part of the reason the spinal column was designed to surround that piece of delicate nerve. But for the Titans to have that spot unprotected by bones…

She accelerated forward using chimneys and roofs as leverage, at the same time applying her Semblance to boost her speed so that she did not fall behind too quickly. It was fortunate that she was still able to use that and her Aura in this world. Originating from the soul itself, the Aura granted her faster reflexes, higher regenerative power, and incredible resistance to damage as well as boosting her strength. Without using it, she would likely not be able to actually carry Crescent Rose as casually as she did. Semblance was the display of her personality as a manifestation of the Aura, and that granted her speed faster than even a bullet. Even though she were able to use it, the humans in this world seemed not to have mastered its control. Perhaps there was something different between them, she mused; or perhaps they had not discovered their inner power just yet.

Scenery passed by her rapidly. The recruits used the Gear like it were an extension of their body, grappling and swinging their bodies through mid-air as if it were a walk in a park. Blake, Weiss and especially Yang were having a bit of trouble keeping up with these soldiers, and Ruby herself had to use her Semblance. The town seemed designed for the use of the Gear: some attics were deliberately built high into the air, giving sturdy vertical surfaces for anchoring the wires. The city was also dotted with observation towers that were tall and wide enough for several recruits to move. Ruby had the suspicion that the town was planned and built in case there was a Titan incursion, and what limited area of it that she had seen suggested that was true. But it did not make sense; if it were as she suspected—that this was a sacrificial limb that the humans had constructed in their defense against the Titans—why, then, would they place people here? Would they not instead turn the entire town into a military garrison filled with traps, fixed defenses, and enough leverage for the soldiers to move?

"Hey, Eren! Why are people living in the town if they knew—!" She accelerated off of a kick against a slanted roof of the attic and caught up to the leader of the group. The wind screamed in her ears, making it rather hard for her to hear anyone, including herself. In the middle of the leap and the sentence, the bells tolled again, and she could see Eren's face change color as if he were a chameleon. "What's going on!?"

"That means they're incorporating us into the vanguard!" Eren shouted back, sprinting across a long series of rooftops. In the distance, large humanoid silhouettes dotted the scenery, walking, running and swinging their arms around. "The hell is going on!? The vanguards are supposed to last longer than this!"

"It's barely been three minutes since we set out!" Yang twisted around in the air and fired Ember Celica to create additional thrust to keep up. "How many people are in there!?"

"At least a hundred!" Mina cried, seemingly in a panic. "Look! There are way too many Titans!"

Ruby gulped. There were good reasons for Mina to actually panic. There were at least three dozen humanoid shapes in the distance by her last count, and if this many Titans had already moved past the fixed defenses…

"DEVIANT! SCATTER!" Eren called out danger. He himself launched his wires to the left and anchored them on a rooftop, swiftly descending out of the path of his attacker. Ruby was not in the path, but she reacted anyway, swinging Crescent Rose to generate angular momentum as she spun and landed with a roll on a rooftop.

The Titan leaped as if it was an awfully large cricket: Ruby was certain that the creature was at least twenty feet tall, and that it had to weigh at least several tons. There was simply no way that its legs could generate that much force to leap more than half a dozen feet into the air, but it did and with incredible speed. The moment Ruby went out of her roll and stood up was the moment that the Titan crashed into a nearby observation tower face-first, cracking and crushing the stone at the point of impact.

The sound of the crash was enough to make her wince, but she quickly surveyed her surroundings, trying to get a head count. Yang landed not far away from her, breaking several roof tiles when she made a small crater on landing. Weiss was on the other side of the street, having hopped several times in the air with the help of her glyphs to cushion her landing. Blake was dangling in a rather precarious position, having looped Gambol Shroud around the steeple of the watch tower, barely a couple feet away from the head of the leaping Titan. There were five recruits that she could see, and each of them picked a piece of rooftop to land on, ready to attack.

Wait. There were six people in the squad. Where was…?!

The Titan peeled itself away from the mess it made. It was skinned, unlike the Colossus she saw at the wall, and it had visible red and blue blood vessels under its skin. It also had golden eyes, and blond hair like… like the person in its mouth at the moment. Thomas was caught between the Titan's incisors at his waist. He was panicking, Ruby could see; his arms and hands were desperately pushing on the teeth, trying to free him from his bind: "Uh… Ugh… Help…Help—!"

And then, the Titan's jaws snapped shut. There was a moment when Thomas' eyes flashed with pain, but they quickly dulled. Life flowed out of him; the crimson liquid that sustained him burst out from the bottom like a macabre shower. There was a sickening crunch when it happened, too; that crunch, accompanied by bits of him falling out of his upper torso…

Ruby wanted to retch, but there was no time for that. Blake was right above the Titan's mouth like a lure on a fishing hook. They had to kill the Titan right there and then, or—

"BLAKE!" There was a scream and a flurry of projectiles. Ember Celica spat out half a dozen shots at the Titan's face when it fell down to the ground. The explosions rippled across its skin, creating plumes of smoke and fire. Weiss, on the other hand, drew a glyph right under Blake's feet, giving her leverage to leap up and away from the Titan's imminent leap. Its jaws closed as it attempted to bite her, but she used Gambol Shroud to alter her direction. The elastic band stretched for a split second when it wrapped around a chimney, and then the band pulled her away, saving her literally by the skin of the Titan's teeth. The black-haired girl tumbled into the roof in a rather hard landing, coming to a stop at the base of the chimney. An audible grunt later, she slipped from the roof with limp limbs for a couple of moments before she grabbed onto the drainage gutter; the impact knocked the wind out of her for a couple of seconds.

"HOW DARE YOU!?" Eren's bellow snapped Ruby's attention to him. The Titan kicked against the observation tower with enough force to crack and tilt it, and then it leaped away from the group in search for some other prey. Eren followed immediately with a loud hiss from his Gear after launching his wires to follow the beast.

Weiss's cry was shrill: "That idiot! He's going to get himself killed!"

"EREN! Stop! Don't go lone wolf!" Nac was the one trying to stop him, though it was too late. All four of them followed Eren, launching their wires with abandon. Ruby glanced at Yang, a recently recovered Blake, and Weiss numbly, her hand frozen in the air. These people were fighting a threat they were not equipped or prepared to deal with. At the same time, so was the RWBY team: Ruby thought she had had a rather rough life before, but she could never have believed how sheltered she was until she saw…

What should she do? What should the team do? As team leader, what should she…

"We need to follow them! If we don't help, more of them would die!"

"Are you kidding me? If we do follow, the ones dead would be us!"

"Are you saying that we let them die like that?"

"It's their choice to throw their lives away! Plus, if I had to rescue another hot-blooded numbskull from death another time today I'm going to lose it!"

"Ruby! Snap out of it! What are we going to do!?"

"Huh?" It was her sister Yang's voice that finally got her back into the physical world barely a second after the recruits left. "I… I…"

"C'mon! If we retreat back to the garrison and get the elites we might be able to—"

"No, there's no time for that," Ruby bit her lips and hissed. "I'm not… not going to let anyone else die to these monsters any more. These people need help. We have to help."

"You're not thinking straight! We don't even know what to do when we encounter a Titan!"

"We'll just have to wing it!" Ruby dashed from the rooftop, firing Crescent Rose to give her speed a boost. She could hear Weiss' enraged scream of disapproval trailing behind her, but she saw that the white princess was following her. "Watch out for each other and scream if anyone's in trouble! Be aware of your surroundings! These aren't the Grimm we're used to fighting!"

"Titan below!" There was a yell from the recruits in front and Ruby glanced down. It was different from the leaping Titan that chomped Thomas; this one had brunette hair and very little of its lips, resulting in a permanent macabre grin. It opened its mouth around Eren this time and caught his leg, biting it off cleanly. He tumbled to a nearby rooftop, bleeding profusely from the stump. It was too late for him, Ruby winced as the thud of teeth slamming into each other rocked her world. Shock would soon set in, and then blood loss would take care of him if he was not treated quickly enough.

"Incoming! North and west!" Yang was screaming. Ruby glanced around quickly, whirling Crescent Rose as she landed on a rooftop. The Titan that bit off Eren's leg would be her target: if she could not save his life, the least she could do for the person who greeted him was to avenge his death. The nape of its neck was her target, and there was little else that mattered at the time. With a powerful jump she drew a graceful arc into the air, only to find a gigantic hand closing in on her.

"Watch out!" She had no time to discern who shouted what. The battlefield was pure chaos, and she was right in the thick of it. Crescent Rose danced in her hands, responding to her every movement as she used the wicked edge of its scythe to cut off every finger on that hand with a clean slash. Her body spun in mid-air after she made the cut while being showered with scalding Titan blood. Using the angular momentum, she landed into a roll on the leg biter's shoulder right up to its neck. Like a human trying to squash a mosquito, it tried to slap its hand down on the shoulder, but Ruby was way too fast. Dashing forward, she pointed Crescent Rose shaft-first at the neck. The blade of the scythe dug into Titan flesh effortlessly, steaming blood bursting out of the cut like a broken garden hose. Immediately before Ruby would lose her footing, she leaped, firing the Rose several times to the rear. The force propelled her across the Titan's neck, making a deep gash in the nape of its neck.

That would probably not be enough, but Ruby had no more footing to use. She was in freefall, and if she did not find any footing any time soon, she would be unable to alter her trajectory. Seeing this, a smaller Titan had opened its mouth under her like a child eyeing a piece of candy falling into its mouth, but a small white glyph appeared under Ruby's foot. Using it as leverage, Ruby leaped, firing Crescent Rose two more times to boost her speed as she changed direction. She hooked Crescent Rose around the Titan's center bones and whirled around its neck, slicing off a considerable chunk of flesh.

Steam burst out of the grievous wounds made to the leg biter. Ruby transformed Crescent Rose mid-spin, letting her momentum propel her high into the air before firing it several more times to accelerate. The parabolic glide path earned her a hard landing on a roof. She oriented herself as much as possible; when she landed with her feet, she immediately absorbed the shock by tucking herself into a ball, rolling over the ridge of the A-shaped roof and coming to a hard stop when she crashed against the outer wall of an attic.

The leg-biter fell with a loud crash, crushing the smaller Titan who attempted to catch Ruby's fall with its mouth. Steam rose up from the corpse as it slowly disintegrated; the smell of well-roasted flesh and the sound of it sizzling as if it were being seared on a hot metal plate almost drove Ruby to retching again.

"We can't leave him like that! We need to help him!"

"Oh god, more of them!"

"Mina, watch out!" Someone else screamed as Ruby struggled to get up. The world was a muddled blur: even though she had her Aura to protect her from receiving serious damage, the force of the impact blacked her out for a moment. In the corner of her eye, she saw Mina being slammed into the wall. A Titan caught her wires as she launched them; it swung her like a yo-yo straight into the outer wall of the building around it. She slid down to the ground, dazed.

"No! No! Ah! AHHH—!" There was another scream; Ruby could not tell whose it was. It was soon muffled. She could see a bearded Titan appear in her peripheral vision, and a pair of legs sticking out of its mouth. With a gulp, it devoured another person.

"Ruby! Are you okay?! That was a hell of a thing you did back there!" Yang was quick to dash to her sister's aid, though Ruby at the moment required little of it. Struggling, she stood up, her legs still quivering.

"We need to keep moving! We can't stay here!" Weiss' rapier glowed bright red as it seared its way through a Titan's palm. Slicing it cleanly in half, the bulk of its hand fell behind her as the stump slammed onto the rooftop in front of her, raining boiling blood on top of the white princess.

"We can't leave them, either! Both Eren and Mina need medical attention!" Blake's afterimage confused another Titan. It tried to pick up the shadow by curling its fingers around it, only to grasp nothing but air. Blake, meanwhile, had leaped on top of its arm. Breaking into a dash, she leaped the moment she reached its shoulder and lunged, digging both Gambol Shroud and its sharpened scabbard into the thick, sturdy flesh of the Titan's neck in two parallel cuts. Using the blades as leverage, she flipped her body, landing her feet on the neck for a split second to gain some leverage before pulling out the swords. In the blink of an eye she sprinted almost with her body parallel to the ground, but she quickly launched Gambol Shroud with its ribbon at the stub of a ruined chimney across the street. The elasticity of the ribbon once again saved her by the skin of her teeth, as a blink of an eye after it pulled her away, the injured Titan attempted to swat her out of the sky.

Ruby's eyes were finally focused enough to see clearly the happenings around her. Blake was on the opposite side of the street, a Titan with two deep but rather short gashes on its neck focusing its attention on her. Weiss was at least a couple dozen feet away from Blake on the same side of the street, a Titan with silvery hair and a smooth chin trying desperately to grab her with its good hand while its injured hands regenerated amazingly quickly. Yang was still beside her, but her sister's attention was not on her. Instead, she was blasting away at a Titan who found them to be delicious treats. And Mina…

"Mina! GET OUT OF THERE!" Ruby screamed. There was a much smaller Titan—about ten to twelve feet tall, she estimated—in front of the collapsed girl. Without so much as thinking, she extended Crescent Rose into its scythe form and slammed it down onto the roof. There was no time to make it to Mina's location: she was too far away, and to descend onto street level when several additional Titans were advancing toward their location was the equivalent of suicide. The moment Crescent Rose's optics popped up, Ruby cycled the weapon and began firing one bullet after another at the smaller Titan, hoping that her rounds would distract it long enough for Mina to come to consciousness and escape.

Mina was conscious, Ruby could see. She could even see the girl's horrified expression through Crescent Rose's optics as the Titan grasped her in its hand. Letting out a desperate cry, Ruby emptied her magazine, dumping half a dozen additional shots of high-velocity sniper rifle bullets into the Titan. It chose to ignore the piercing projectiles altogether, even when they tore small holes through it.

"Help! Mommy! I don't want to be eaten like this—" Ruby's vision reddened when Mina's cry reached her ears. She could hear the light "clack" of her empty magazine falling onto the roof. She could hear the mechanism of her weapon ejecting the last spent brass from its chamber. She could hear the clatters of empty cartridges bouncing across the roofing tiles. She could hear the ring of Crescent Rose being yanked from its anchored position. She could hear the wind blasting into her ear when she accelerated toward Mina.

And then, her world rocked. She crashed back into the outer wall, her stomach having been struck by something rather blunt. She blacked out again for a couple of moments, and then she coughed; if it were not for her Aura having flared up at the moment of impact, she would have lost a couple of ribs along with her entire spine. Adrenaline forced her to recover quickly, something that she wished had never happened, for when she opened her eyes, she saw Mina's upper body being shoved into the Titan's mouth.

Yang was standing in front of her. Her sister kicked her in the abdomen and stopped her from charging to Mina's defense. Ruby snarled at the blonde and tried to dash forward again, but instead she coughed. There was something sour in her mouth; something was welling up from her stomach. The moment after she realized that, she retched to the side, regurgitating acid onto the rooftop.

"She's gone," Yang said. Ruby coughed again and threw up more acid. Her throat burned from it, and her entire body felt sick. Yang's mere words made her sick. In between pants, she tried to hiss and scream at her sister, but she could not. On the edge of her vision, she could see the bearded Titan chomp off someone's arm, and at the same time Armin was thrown out of that Titan's mouth.

"All of them are gone," Ruby choked. The entire scene lasted less than three minutes. Five out of six in the squad were devoured. Only one Titan was felled, and that was because Ruby was too fast at full combat speed for it to catch. Even that kill came with a price: she had two twenty-round magazines left. If she continued to fight at this rate, she would run out of rounds in the blink of an eye, and then she would be left at the Titan's mercy.

"Armin!" The bearded giant moved again, trying to use its hand to sweep up a stunned Armin. Someone's severed limb lay in front of him, the blood from which stained the blonde boy's uniform and face. There was a trail of blood from where Eren was to where Armin was, but Eren himself was nowhere to be seen.

"Damn it!" Blake sprinted across the rooftop and launched Gambol Shroud. Yang shook loose the spent shells from Ember Celica and reloaded them all in five seconds before spitting out another six glowing red shots at the bearded Titan. The shots crashed on its face, setting its hair and its skin on fire, but it was unfazed. It was through sheer luck that Gambol Shroud could reach Armin in time, wrapping itself around his immobile and saliva-stained body before violently jerking him toward Blake. The blond boy crashed into Blake's body, using the girl as a cushion as they rolled on the roof. They came to a stop at the stub of a chimney, well out of reach of the Titans in the area.

"We can't handle the Titans around here!" Weiss quickly drew up a series of small glyphs in mid-air extending to the rear. "We need to retreat and find support!"

Gritting her teeth, Ruby finally nodded: "We'll head to the rear and get the rear guard!"


	3. Chapter 3

Author's Note:

1. Again, this story will only be updated when a chapter is ready. I am still looking for a proofreader/beta-reader so if you want to see a chapter in advance, PM me and let me know. This may or may not help to get a chapter out one or two days early.

2. Blake is human enough. I don't see a meaningful distinction between human and faunus in the AoT world.

3. The way that RWBY team came into the AoT world is stretching the lore of Remnant a little. I think this should be fine. The JNPR team would make appearances in the story once in a while to have some connection with Remnant.

4. The next chapter will have the Rogue Titan. The Battle of Trost is a major event that warrants and justifies many words. The Reclamation of Trost is also a major event, though I'm still uncertain how many words would be spent describing it.

5. I'm aware that RWBY season 2 is going to air relatively soon. Whether or not this story will take into account whatever new information that pops up will be at my discretion. For now, sit back and enjoy.

* * *

Jaune Arc fidgeted quietly outside Headmaster Ozpin's office. The young man was rather lankily built and always sporting a head of messy blond hair, as though he never bothered to brush and groom himself. His teammate, Pyrrha Nikos, was standing beside him. "Are you nervous, Jaune?" The redhead said quietly, pressing a hand on his shoulder.

"Y-Yeah, a little bit," the man responded quietly, offering Pyrrha a nervous smile. It was the first time he was called to the Headmaster's office. There had been quite a stir after the event that happened earlier in the day, and his other teammates—Lie Ren and Nora Valkyrie—were preparing a detailed report on what had transpired in their dorm room.

The event that resulted in team RWBY's disappearance made the news, of course, but their involvement had somehow not become public knowledge yet. Roman Torchwick's escape was inevitable, as without Weiss' glyph support and Ruby's speed they had few options to keep up with even a crippled Bullhead tilt-jet. He made the smart decision to have Ren shut Nora in the dorm room; that delayed the travel speed of the news, but eventually everyone would find out about the event.

"It's going to be all right," Pyrrha reassured him. She tied her head of flowing red hair into a ponytail, and was then wearing the standard uniform for students at Beacon Academy: a modest brown suit lined with a white dress shirt fastened with red ribbons at the neck on the top, and a pleated plaid skirt with a similar color of brown at the bottom.

Jaune could only nod and return an appreciative half-smile. Pyrrha had been quite supportive of his role as the leader of the JNPR team; with her behind his back, he felt a little bit more confident about his decisions. Before he could answer, however, the double door to the office opened, and Headmaster Ozpin's voice came through them: "Come in."

Jaune jolted silently before he turned. The Headmaster's office was massive, but it was dimly illuminated. Books and file cabinets lined the back and left walls; the right wall was clear of objects, serving as a giant projector screen. The Headmaster's redwood desk sat in the middle to the room, closer to the giant wall of glass behind him, looking out at the rest of the Academy.

The Headmaster was a man of indeterminate age. It was perhaps because the fact that there was not a single crease on his pale face conflicted with his greyish silver hair and his rather outdated fashion sense. He dressed like an aristocrat from old videos, with a high-collar green sweater lining the inside of his black coat with actual copper buttons. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses even inside the room, which puzzled Jaune: how could he even see anything in such dim lights?

Ozpin's assistant, Glynda Goodwitch, stood on his left hand side. The full-fledged Huntress was dressed in her typical office worker's attire: white blouse top with a black vest around her waist and hip, and a tight-fitting dress with black leggings on the bottom. Her signature violet cape with uneven bottom draped over her as always. If Headmaster Ozpin caused Jaune to be nervous, the sight of Glynda instilled nothing but sheer terror: those eyes behind her glasses were positively murderous, and she had her riding crop in her hand.

"Mister Jaune Arc and Miss Pyrrha Nikos," the Headmaster said with his calm and collected voice. His hands were folded in front of his lips, and his elbows were resting on his massive oak desk. "Would you please close the door behind you? We have serious business to discuss.

"Uh, s-sure," Jaune said meekly, closing the heavy doors behind. At the same time, the whirring of motors accompanied the descent of a massive piece of steel plate over the glass walls, sealing the room in almost perfect darkness before the lights on the ceiling lit up, shrouding everyone in twilight.

"Miss Goodwitch, would you kindly display the footage of the event, please." At the Headmaster's command, the projector on top of a bookshelf near the left wall hummed to life. Images of the black sphere were cast on the wall to Jaune's right.

"How did you…?"

"We collected it from the cargo yard's security cameras," Glynda said. Jaune shuddered; her words pierced his chest like they were sharp spears carved from the coldest ice. It seemed that nothing would escape the eyes of the Headmaster and his staff.

"Now, would you kindly inform me of the event that drew your attention to the criminal activities of Roman Torchwick?" The Headmaster's voice was comparatively warmer than the Huntress', but it was no less intimidating. "Curiosity? Justice? Or was it something else?"

"Blake was involved in an investigation into the White Fang and found something," Jaune recalled. "Ruby and her team was extensively involved with that. They asked for our help after Blake disappeared."

"It was curious that neither you nor Ruby reported this to legitimate Huntsmen and Huntresses such as myself—" Glynda snapped, but Ozpin stopped her by raising one hand.

"Thank you, Mister Arc," the Headmaster said with a small smile on his face. "Tell me the circumstances around which you observed this phenomenon."

"Blake was captured, and we were in pursuit," Pyrrha answered this time, standing straight at attention. "Nora crippled the Bullhead with a shot to the engine, and the seven of us were chasing after it. Ruby and Weiss staged an operation to board the aircraft and extract Blake, but there was confusion and then…"

"Then it happened. Interesting," the Headmaster finished the sentence for her; she nodded in response. "Did you observe anything before the event?"

"Blake was thrown out of the rear hatch of the aircraft. After that, there was an object that fell out of the aircraft's cargo bay. I was far away, so I could not identify the object itself, though I could say that it was rather small and had dim lights of various colors on its surface."

"Did it change before the blackened sphere appeared?"

"Yes, sir," Pyrrha answered. "The lights flared for a brief moment before the black sphere appeared."

"Thank you, Miss Nikos," the Headmaster nodded, seemingly deep in thought. Some uncomfortable silence later, he stood up. As he walked past Glynda, he gestured: "Miss Goodwitch, show them the slide on Object 103."

"But sir…"

"They've already seen it," replied Ozpin. Glynda nodded slowly before working the remote again. After stepping through several slides, the picture of a gem-studded sphere appeared on the wall. A large "TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY" watermark was stamped across the picture, and small words on the bottom said "TOP SECRET. EYES ONLY. DUPLICATION OR DISSEMINATION WILL BE PROSECUTED WITH HIGH TREASON" in bold, capital letters.

"This information is not to leave this room, but I'm sure you are aware of that given the copious amount of warnings here," Headmaster Ozpin stood in front of both Jaune and Pyrrha. Jaune swallowed hard; he could feel sweat seeping out of his forehead. They were stepping into extremely dicey territory; even a person as dense as he understood that when he saw the picture.

"Despite the knowledge of the properties of Dust and its uses, we know that certain phenomena are impossible to achieve with it. I believe you were witnesses to such a phenomenon. Object 103 is an item that we recovered from the ruins of what we believe was an older civilization that fell to the Grimm. Academia—especially archaeologists and historians—are debating its function, but I believe we saw what it does."

"Similar events had happened before," Glynda added, walking toward the group examining the photo. "One of the convoys transporting an object similar to Object 103 disappeared in the middle of its route along with a large chunk of the road and the earth. That convoy was found about five hundred miles away in the bottom of a lake, along with the aforementioned chunk of the land above them."

"Then…"

"It is certainly possible that Ruby and her team were transported to some unfortunate location," Headmaster Ozpin stopped Jaune in the middle of his sentence. The slide changed to one with two pictures side by side. Jaune could see that even though they were of similar size, the gems on the studs were different. "We know very little of these devices and their purposes, save that they could carve off large chunks of the environment and transport them to indeterminate locations. The gems on the device could indicate the configuration of the device, but there are way too many unknowns for us to guess their approximate function."

"Is there a plan to organize a search party for team RWBY?" Pyrrha spoke up, sounding concerned.

"A covert search operation is already under way. Obviously, we cannot let the general populace know such dangerous items existed, or such an impossible phenomenon occurred," Ozpin said, walking in front of the two students with his cane at the side. "You understand what you must do, yes?"

"I feel like I've… stepped in something way over my head," Jaune stuttered to Ozpin's amusement.

"You have. And now that you've known about what happened, I'm afraid I can't let you leave," the Headmaster's smile turned wicked. Jaune tensed, and Pyrrha's eyes narrowed before Ozpin let out an amused chuckle. "Let us discuss the parts the JNPR team shall play in this little theatrical production of ours, shall we?"

* * *

Ruby suppressed her urge to retch once again when they came to a stop on top of a roof well away from the site of the massacre—no, that would not be accurate to describe the current situation. They were in the middle of a one-sided slaughter of humans even as they fought valiantly against their foes. Despite the ingenuity in the creation of the Maneuver Gear, despite the might of the fortifications built to withstand all but the fiercest of Titan attacks, and despite the will of everyone to fight and to survive, they were undoubtedly losing.

Armin was on Blake's back. Ruby saw but emptiness in his eyes; he was too shocked to act. She could not blame him. Compared to what Ruby witnessed, the event had to have taken a greater toll on him than her: those who sacrificed themselves were not her friends.

Gently setting down the comatose boy against the wall of an attic, Blake turned around and joined the gathering of the team. Among the four of them, only Ruby with her scythe at her side remained standing. Weiss' white dress was almost entirely colored dark red; she was showered with Titan blood when she fended off attacks from one. At the moment, she had Myrtenaster's cylinder open, and was proceeding to refill the chambers with Dust from vials she carried.

"I won't have much Dust left after this," she whispered. The vials gave a visible puff when she softly nudged the powder into the revolving chambers. "Well, at least the white Dust. I haven't used much of the other ones, but I don't expect them to last too long either."

"And I'm running dry, too. I have about two reloads left." Yang added, retracting Ember Celica into its bracelet form. She lay back onto the roof and placed her hands behind her head, looking up at the sky. "The sun had the decency to hide itself, at least."

"I hate cloudy days," Ruby mumbled. All of a sudden, the scenery in front of her grew too bright for her to keep her eyes open, even though the sky was turning a shade of dark grey. Flashes of Thomas' upper torso would dominate her sight whenever she closed her eyes. Mina's screaming was in her ears, too. She desperately wished she were blind and deaf.

"We have to think about our next steps," Blake sat with her right leg over her left in a meditative pose. Her mind was anything but quiet, though, and she fidgeted for a book that was not to be found. "At this rate, if we continue fighting these things, we'll run out of supplies and fall, too."

"That's what I've been saying from the start. It shouldn't be that hard to fight these things."

"But it is, and we found out the hard way. There's no changing that."

"Should we run away over the wall, then? From what they described, the other side of Wall Rose should be safe," Yang offered. "Given our Dust supplies, it shouldn't be hard for us to leap over to the other side, and then we'll be able to see if we can replenish it."

Safety was something with which Ruby had never concerned herself in addition to the availability of Dust. Certainly, Roman Torchwick and his White Fang lackeys could carry out some heinous deeds, and the Grimm were dangerous opponents; with her powers, her abilities and Dust-powered Crescent Rose, however, she was more than competent enough to take care of herself. In this new world, she was powerless.

She could not even save Mina from her fate.

"Yeah, but for how long?" Blake countered. "You've seen how outclassed these people are. Once the walls are gone, these people are just fodder to the Titans! If we don't help them, we will be, too!"

"That doesn't mean we run into battle without a plan!" Weiss was equally fierce. "We'll become Titan food long before we can kill Titans if we just charge into a fight without thinking about the consequences!"

"Sorry…" Ruby whispered to the side. The conversation did not involve her or Yang, but she was a part of it anyway.

"It's not your fault," Yang rolled over to her sister, laying a hand on the red haired-girl's shoulder. "None of us were aware of the situation. Now that we know what we're up against, we can do a better job next time."

"If there would be a next time! I think our top priority is to search for a way to get out of here and back to Vale instead of wasting our resources fighting a hopeless war against things that couldn't possibly be eradicated!"

"We don't have time for that! Who knows when the Titans will launch another assault against the Wall? The next time the huge one appears, it would be the end for Wall Rose! And then where do you think we can find information on what happened and how to get out?"

"What do you suggest we do then!?"

"Find out if Dust exists and resupply ourselves. Then train the soldiers here to use Dust, Aura and Semblance," Blake continued almost immediately over Weiss' shrill incredulous cries of "are you kidding me": "We have techniques and knowledge, and they have experience and numbers. We need to mate these together and create a force so powerful that it is enough to stand up against the Titans!"

"Blake, that's not a bad idea, but you're stretching it a little too much without the facts lined up," Yang joined Weiss in opposition, though she sounded much more level-headed, "We don't even know how long we're going to last out here."

Ruby shuddered in Yang's arms as she listened to her team members' quarrel. There was no question about how outclassed they were; a simple three minutes of combat against the Titans seemed to have sapped the life out of them. The psychological effects of these Titans on them were much more serious, she realized as she saw her own hands trembling in front of her. She had been recalling vividly the scenes of the massacre before. Although Blake, Yang and Weiss were not showing it, Ruby was rather certain that they were trying to deal with it in their own ways.

Shake it off, she told herself; what was done was done, and there was no changing it. She had to look forward. She could not afford to brood over it. Her entire team was bickering and quarrelling because she was not decisive enough, because she had frozen in the face of such adversity, she thought. She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh before grabbing her own wrist to steady her hands. Biting down on her lips, she softly shook free Yang's embrace and stood up.

"Guys, I think…" Ruby was just about to say something when she saw the crowd of people down at street level. It was an unusually large crowd gathered in front of the gate. From what she had seen before, the gate was wide enough to accommodate at least five people walking side by side without much trouble. Though the crowd had reduced in size since they left the area less than ten minutes ago, the reduction was not much: "What are those people doing there? Shouldn't they have already evacuated?"

The group's attention snapped to the crowd. Ruby herself picked up Crescent Rose and leaped over a gap between roofs to approach the gate in order to see more clearly. What she saw infuriated her. There was a rather wide cart full of packaged items lodged in the gate. It was drawn by a pair of horses, and despite the efforts—and the whip—of the driver, they could not pull it through the gate: "What the _hell_ is _that_ doing in the gate?"

Ruby could not hear the argument that went on around the cart; her ears were still buzzing a little somehow, and she was not sure why. There was a fat merchant in his pompous business clothing and a top hat standing at the rear, seemingly self-important enough that he had two big, burly men as his bodyguards. Ruby assumed that the cart was his. Other people could not have this much possession to ferry through the gate; the refugees carried little to no items of value on them at all. Those guards were standing in front of him while he yelled, sending his spit flying everywhere. Several men from the surrounding civilians tried to attack the merchant, only to be thrown to the ground and kicked. There was a Garrison soldier standing there, too, wearing his Maneuver Gear. He was rather helpless; his eyes darted back and forth, uncertain how to handle the situation.

How _dare_ he obstruct the gate in a situation like this?

"Oh, crap… TITAN!" Yang's bellow pulled Ruby's attention back to the street away from the gate just before she started her charge toward the merchant, her scythe flashing with intent to kill. The warning seemed to have agitated the masses below; the crowd began to shift in panic, forming waves and waves of people trying desperately to push the cart into—and through—the gate.

The Titan was another deviant, Ruby could tell, for it was approaching at incredible speed. The regular ones they fought were of rather slow gait; they were only a threat because the soldiers did not have good maneuverability options and because there were so many of them. There was barely a moment to think before her body moved. She was in a position to intercept the Titan, and nothing else mattered. Turning herself into a red blur, she sprinted along the roofs toward the monster, all the while searching for a point of leverage to launch her assault.

Small dots of shapes were coming into her view as she approached the giant. Those were the rear guard, Ruby realized in a split second, and they were having trouble catching up to it even with their Maneuver Gear running at full speed. As ingenious as the Gear was, it was limited by physics and materials unlike Dust. Suppressing a mental sigh, Ruby caught sight of the spot of roof at which she would lunge at the Titan to attack. Weiss had caught sight of that, as well, it appeared: several small white glyphs had already appeared, waiting for her use. Sparing a small smile, she leaped off of the edge of the roof. Tumbling in the air, she landed and leaped thrice, each boosted by a glyph. The wicked edge of Crescent Rose let out a cold, blinding glare in the sun, thirsting for the blood of this monster.

But it was not her kill. Out of nowhere, a blur of movement streaked under Ruby's path. Two almost invisible wires anchored themselves into the nape of the neck, dragging and securing the soldier to the Titan. Before Ruby could strike, the two blades in the soldier's hands had already swung down, carving a piece of flesh almost as big as the soldier himself from the humanoid beast.

Without so much as a scream, the giant stumbled. The swing of Crescent Rose could not be held back, however, and the soldier was right under the tip of the scythe. Ruby had to transform it to avoid hurting the soldier, but without the scythe there would be no leverage for her and she would fall to the ground. Having completed her swing, she extended the scythe again; a slanted white glyph appeared under her feet in the nick of time and she jumped, lodging her scythe into the Titan's flesh till it found purchase on a bone.

The soldier stood on the Titan's neck when it crashed into the ground barely a dozen feet from the outside of the crowd. Ruby pulled out the scythe with ease and retracted it into its less intimidating form. The more immediate problem of a Titan attack was solved. The soldier's skill was far more impressive than what she had seen even from the other rear guard soldiers, but she was certain that they would meet someday. There was, however, a much more aggravating problem remaining.

"What… are you all doing here?" The soldier spoke, but Ruby had no time to be surprised by the femininity of her voice. Instead, she slung Crescent Rose onto her back and walked forward. Despite her stature, her presence caused the people to split a narrow path for her, and she proceeded unimpeded into the clearing around the cart.

"Push, you worthless bastards! Push so that you can get through!" The fat man cursed. There were a couple of men lying on the ground in front of him and his bodyguards, still reeling from the failed fight against them a minute before.

"Shut up!" The surrounding dissent quieted. The refugees, the bodyguards, and the fat merchant, all of them focused their attention on the diminutive girl in a strange, black-and-red dress with a large block of red on her back.

"H-How dare you talk to me like this, brat?" The fat merchant replied, indignant. "Who the hell are you?"

"Shut it! Do you have any idea what's happening? People are dying out there to get all of you evacuated! Why are you blocking the gate?"

"Of course I do! Aren't they supposed to sacrifice themselves so that we can evacuate with our goods?" Ruby's teeth grated audibly with the response. She could feel the soldier's presence behind her, but she did not care. "They've freeloaded on us for a hundred years! It's finally time they repaid their masters!"

Ruby's Aura flared. Her power raged around her, appearing as wicked tendrils of red around her body. She unhooked Crescent Rose from her waist. The weapon expanded to its rightful form as loudly as it possibly could be. Hefting the giant scythe in one hand, she walked forward with sure steps, having found a strange sense of peace and clarity within her even amidst the maelstrom. There was intent, purpose, and direction, so clear and so sure that she had no question on what she should do next.

"W-What are you doing? Who are you?" With each sound Crescent Rose produced, the fat merchant quivered. With each step Ruby took, his bodyguards shook. The sun cast its rays on Crescent Rose's blade, creating a flash so brilliant and cold that everyone—even the soldier—winced at the sight of its magnificence.

"She's j-j-just a little kid! Get her!" The two bodyguards let out a desperate cry as they charged with their fists raised. Ruby simply affirmed her stance and flipped the scythe so that it was pointing behind her. Using the weapon as a quarterstaff, she spun it, catching one of them square in the abdomen with its head. Her Aura flared as she spun him around as if he were attached to the scythe, lifting him off of his foot and smashing him into the other bodyguard like a ragdoll before batting them away like a baseball. The two men almost crashed into the crowd as it parted in panic to give way; instead, they tumbled into a broken heap at the end of their trip.

"I-I-I'll get you for this! Do you have any idea how powerful I am? Do you even know who my friends are? One word from me and they'll—"

"I'm sure you'll be talking plenty after I splatter the inside of your skull onto your precious cargo," Crescent Rose crashed down hard in front of him with these words, sinking its tip deep into the ground. One by one, the fat merchant's buttons on his shirt fell into cleanly cut halves. The merchant's face was completely drained of blood when he stared into Crescent Rose's muzzle and found death stare back at him. He almost fell on his bottom and roll down the slope toward Crescent Rose like a giant beach ball, but he managed to steady himself to his credit.

"M-Move the cart out of the way," he stammered even as he struggled to contain his bowels. A moment later, the cart was out and back to the side, and the crowd of civilians stormed through the gate in droves. All of them, however, left space for the brave red girl and the soldier, giving them a wide margin.

"Thank you, big sisters!" A little girl said as Ruby retracted her scythe. She turned around and found a small, blonde girl holding hands with what she assumed to be her mother, smiling at both her and the soldier. Ruby gave her the only response she knew; she smiled gently at her, earning a bright-eyed grin from the girl.

The soldier, on the other hand, saluted, and it was then that Ruby finally got a good glimpse of her. She was about as tall as Eren was, with a beautiful head of short black hair that almost glistened under the sun. Around her neck, there was a dark red woolen scarf, and it was apparently taken care of meticulously. Her body was incredibly toned, but still retaining some feminine curves to her shape. She had a pair of chipped blades in her hands; perhaps that was the result of slaying several Titans, or perhaps it was the damage they had received during the last excessively violent cut. She was wearing the standard uniform with a set of crossed swords on top of a pentagonal shield at the back of her brown jacket. Her deep grey eyes were piercing and calm, unlike the panic Ruby had seen in the recruits in Eren's squad. Her lips were small but supple, and they pursed when she turned around, along with a slight widening of her eyes.

"Uh, I'm Ruby Rose. It's nice to meet you," Ruby introduced herself, smiling sheepishly. The clarity of purpose from her previous moment had faded, replaced by some apprehension and some curiosity. If the soldier were trained in the art of using her Aura and equipped with weapons powered by Dust, Ruby was sure that she would certainly give everyone in the team a run for her money.

"Mikasa Ackerman." Her voice was icy cold and flat, but the corner of her lips did curl up a miniscule amount. Not giving Ruby any time to engage in further conversation, she turned around and released her old blades, having them clatter to the ground, before firing the wires and moving to the top of a roof, where another soldier waited.

Ruby sighed at the cold reception, but she understood that there was little time for pleasantries. Now that the civilians were almost completely evacuated from the Trost District, real work could begin. She jumped back onto the roof…

…and saw Titans latching themselves onto the Garrison tower. There were at least half a dozen of them visible inside the Garrison, and those were the tall ones. The short ones were probably obscured by the walls or inside the building itself.

"Oh, god," Ruby breathed. The rest of her team also stood up, stunned that the Titans had advanced that far into the town. "That's the Garrison, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Blake whispered as well. "How many people are in there?"

"I don't know. Is it really the time to care about something that's already lost?"

"Remember what Eren told us on the way about the plan?" Ruby pointed out to Weiss while using Crescent Rose's optics as a makeshift telescope. "The soldiers are supposed to be resupplied and then climb the wall after the fight is done. Now that the Garrison is occupied, how many soldiers do you think are getting resupplied? And if they run out of gas, how effective do you think they would be?"

"We're going to run out of supplies ourselves if we try to deal with those Titans," Weiss countered, pointing at the Garrison with her rapier. "Besides, there are only four of us, and dozens of Titans! You know how hard it was for us to kill even one of them, didn't you? What makes you think we have a chance against that many?"

"These people are meat on a slab if they can't get resupplied," Ruby bit her lips, her voice lowering into a growl, "and… I'm just tired of seeing people die in front of me, knowing that I could have saved them. I just can't live with myself if I don't do something about it."

Weiss sighed heavily. She closed her eyes and pursed her lips before turning around with her back to Ruby and her face toward Yang and Blake: "Hey, you two, can you take care of that guy over there and find us backups?"

"Wait, you're not…" Ruby's eyes widened. "It's not—you don't have to come with me!"

"If you go alone, you're going to get killed for sure," the white-haired princess snapped at Ruby without turning around. "At least you'll have a chance with some backup."

"We're going with you two, then! That way we'll stand more of a chance!" Yang sprang up, Ember Celica at the ready.

"No, your weapon is almost useless against a Titan," Weiss objected. "We're only going to last so long in there, and we definitely can't kill every Titan around. We need help, and we need it fast. You need to get the word out there… Get the word out there, and get whoever you can find to help us."

"She's right," Blake said. "We'll take care of it. You just stay alive for as long as you can. Help will come."

Easier said than done, Ruby thought wryly as she leaped across the bridge, leaving behind a flurry of falling rose petals.

* * *

Jean Kirstein landed on a roof and sighed, the darkening sky matching perfectly with his mood. The retreat signal had rung. Civilians were evacuated, and the gate to the interior of Wall Rose securely sealed. The soldiers' jobs were done; they would then go and resupply themselves at the Garrison, and then retreat into the safety of the Wall. Or, that was supposed to be the plan. Unable to operate without using as little gas as possible without being killed, their canisters were all almost empty. They had barely enough gas to get to the Garrison; when they got there, all that was going to be waiting for them were the ravenous mouths of the Titans.

There was also supposed to be a supply mission where the people in the Garrison were supposed to fill up canisters of gas and then come out to find stranded soldiers like them to resupply them. That plan, of course, went belly-up the moment Jean saw the Garrison itself being swarmed. Of course, if the supply troops had not reached them by then, it was a certainty that they barricaded themselves inside the halls, clinging to life even though it would only be a precious few hours longer.

"Damn it," he cursed under his breath. How could this have happened to him? He was destined for a post inside Wall Shina, close to the king and far away from all this bloodshed and violence. He was supposed to raise a family, have kids, and have his kids go into something other than the military. He was supposed to live a full and satisfying life to a ripe old age, with friends and family surrounding him as he died in his bed!

"Jean, what do we do now?" Marco saw the same thing Jean saw. In fact, most people in the 104th Trainee Squad saw the same thing he did. There were about a dozen of them here, and all of them were almost out of gas.

"How the hell should I know?" Jean shook his head and placed his palm on his face before sitting down. There were precious few options for them to do anything about their current situation. Without the Garrison they were not going to get resupplied, and it was not like anyone who already escaped into the interior had the guts to fight against dozens of Titans at the same time: "Like it or not, we're stranded here because the bastards at the depot hanged us out to dry like fish."

"We have no choice but to fight!" Conny shook his fist at Jean. "We have to clear the Garrison so that others can resupply!"

"We don't have enough gas left! We'll be Titan food if we charge in!" Marco objected.

"We're Titan food anyway if we stay here! If we keep running away, we'll never get resupplied! And when we lose our mobility, it's all over for us!"

"It's nice of you to actually use your brain for once, Conny, but that doesn't change the fact that we're outnumbered," Jean smiled bitterly. There were around two dozen people—all from the 104th Trainee Squad—around him. Most were spent from combat, and some were shuddering and crying over the things they had seen. Even if they were fresh troops eager to jump into battle, and even if they were skilled enough to compare to the veterans in the Garrison, they were only twenty people. Twenty people could not possibly exterminate even ten Titans!

"Most of the veterans from the Garrison had already been slaughtered. We're just rookies, and we're all that's left," Jean continued, sighing in resignation. "And even if we could find a leader or some veterans, the Garrison's probably already all infested with 4-meter class Titans already; what can we do against that many enemies given how little gas we had left? It's suicide, plain and simple."

"Then… it's no use? We're just going to sit here and wait to be eaten?" Conny's voice was thick like molasses.

"Yeah, pretty much. What a shitty life we have," Jean stood up. The realization of the inevitable was rather liberating to him. He stretched to relax his muscles, his body aching from the fights he had gone through earlier in the town. Taking in a deep breath of air, he relished the moment, even though the air was filled with the tang of blood and cooked flesh. Letting out another sigh at the end of his stretch, he patted down his uniform; he would not want to charge to his death without looking acceptable, at least: "well, I suppose we should make a run for it, for whatever good it'll do…"

"Hey! Hey, you guys!" There was a rather loud female voice approaching, and Jean turned around. He saw a blonde with rather revealing clothing approach, followed by a black-haired, less-endowed girl with Armin of all people on her back.

"Who the hell are these guys?" He arched an eyebrow. A sideway glance to Marco told him that his best friend was equally amazed, surprised, and amused at the appearance of the two ladies.

"Hey! It's you guys! I thought you'd fled with the civvies by now!" Conny walked up to the two women, rubbing his buzzcut somewhat apprehensively. "Where's Ruby and Weiss? I thought there were four of you?"

"And what happened to Armin?" Jean's head jerked to find Sasha walking toward the group of new people. "What about Eren? What happened to his squad?"

"We need your help!" Yang said right after Blake gently set Armin down by the stub of a chimney. "Ruby and Weiss headed to the Garrison to clear it out so that people can resupply. They need help, and they need it fast!"

"But that's suicide!" Marco objected. Jean, on the other hand, shuddered at the implication. "We're all running out of gas! Even if we go, we can't help much but become Titan chow!"

"There's no time! You're the only group I see around here! My sister's going to die in there! I'm not going to let that happen!" Yang snapped at Marco, but then she glanced around and realized why he was saying such things. Out of the twenty-something recruits gathered around the rooftops, only a handful of them were standing or remotely interested in the conversation. The rest were either tucked in fetal position or sitting down with their heads bowed. She could only imagine—no, she corrected herself; she could never imagine what they would have witnessed. Like Armin, most of them would have lost comrades-in-arms or loved ones, and they were staring at death itself. In better circumstances, Yang would never know what to say to these. She would have attempted to soothe their sorrow or refer them to a trauma specialist. Circumstances could hardly get worse, she mused, but then she decided against tempting fate. Sighing with sagged shoulders, she gestured to Armin: "Well, if you're not going to help, then Blake and I need to head off. Take care of Armin, would you?"

"Wait a second," Jean reached out to Yang. She spared a glance at him. The totally unremarkable man had ash-brown hair cut into a rather curt style, with the lower part of the hair shorter than the hair at the top of his scalp. His face was more rectangular and rather long compared to everyone else. His brown eyes was the feature that attracted Yang's attention for more than a second that she intended to spare for him.

"You can't go alone! You'll all get killed!" Conny exclaimed.

"Everyone! Let's help them! Maybe together we can succeed! What do you say?" Sasha was on Yang's side as well. The blonde squeezed out a small smile, but it faded when she saw no movement in the rest of the recruits. It was too much to expect a few words to motivate these defeated men and women to bravely march to their doom on the first day they see combat, she knew; the sight of it still made her grit her teeth.

"Annie!" A familiar figure landed on the rooftop and dashed toward a group of recruits standing on the outside of the conversation. There was a rather short girl with blonde hair tied into a short ponytail and blue eyes that shone with dull light of indifference and two giant man, one lanky with black hair and the other burly with similar blond hair. As Yang and the other recruits argued, they were simply gazing in the direction of the Garrison and remaining rather silent.

"Mikasa?" Upon hearing the call, the blonde girl tilted her head to regard the figure. Yang recognized the black-haired soldier; she was the one that killed the Titan Ruby was going for at the gates. Evidently she had made a round in the city and recorded some kills: her uniform was stained with some blood splatters, and the boxes on her Gear had only a pair of fresh blades left.

"Aren't you supposed to be with the rear guard?" The quarrel broke up when Mikasa landed. Every recruit—including the ones who had seemingly lost all hope—looked up at her. Yang could sense the atmosphere changing around her, as if Mikasa's mere presence inspired something in these defeated men and women.

"They've already retreated." Contrary to Mikasa's flat facial expression, Yang could hear a hint of urgency in her voice. "Annie, where's Eren? He was with Armin."

Annie did not respond verbally. Instead, she used her head to gesture at Armin, who remained slumped.

"What happened to his team?"

"Same as so many others out there, I guess."

"Damn. Of all the people who could've gotten out alive, why does it have to be that guy?"

Yang could hear her teeth grinding. The whispers, however quiet, was getting on her nerves. Mikasa, however, walked at a brisk pace until she arrived at Armin's side. Kneeling down, she whispered to the comatose boy: "Armin, are you hurt? Is everything okay? Where's Eren? What happened?"

Yang knew perfectly well what happened, though it was neither her place nor Blake's to tell Mikasa the truth. Her words seemed to stir something inside Armin. He twitched a little, the only movement that Yang and Blake had seen from him ever since they saved him from the Titan. Slowly, his head rose to look at the black-haired woman. The whispers ceased as well, leaving the group in deafening silence for a brief eternity before the floodgates of his soul opened.

"Thomas Wagner, Nac Tilus, Mina Caroline, Millius Zermusky, and… and Eren Jeager… of the 34th Trainee Squad… have bravely fallen in the line of duty!"

The boy screamed his words from the bottom of his lung. The declaration caused quite the stir among the rest of the recruit; some were questioning the sanity of charging toward the garrison, while others felt vindication. The consensus that their lives were doomed remained and perhaps had grown even stronger than before. Yang had little interest in the rabble, though; her attention was focused, then, squarely on Mikasa.

Mikasa made no movement after Armin's teary proclamation. The stillness of her body was such that Yang felt physically uncomfortable looking at it. Save for the barely visible movement of her chest to indicate that she was breathing, there was nothing else that showed that she was not a statue but indeed a living human. Mikasa reminded Yang of Armin's condition when he was yanked away, but somehow the figure of the woman frozen in a kneel in front of the wailing blond boy was so disturbing to her that she had to look away for a brief moment.

"I'm… sorry, Mikasa… Eren… he sacrificed himself to… and I can't… I couldn't do anything…" The boy sobbed into his knees.

"Armin, calm down," Mikasa cooed the boy, placing her hand gently on top of his head and patting her as if she were a mother. Then, her voice hardened: "Don't get emotional!

"Stand! Stand and fight!" She pulled the boy up by his shoulders. Armin stood there, still paralyzed. Mikasa turned around and regarded the Garrison in the distance. Yang stared at her from behind. There was determination in her posture and purpose in her movements, but…

"We must retake the Garrison and resupply," she decreed, turning around to face the group of defeated recruits. "Who's with me?"

"I am," Yang stepped forward.

"And so am I," Blake followed.

"Even with you three, we can't deal with that many Titans!" Marco objected.

"We can, and we will!" Mikasa raised her sword, pointing it straight into the sky. And then, she pointed her sword at the crowd of recruits. "Cowards! Cripples! Incompetent! How shameful! Watch here, and be envious! Be envious of what we achieve!"

"But that's just impossible! There are way too many of them!"

"If I can't, then I shall die. If I can, then I shall live," Mikasa turned around and faced the Garrison. "But the spineless shall not live, because the spineless does not fight."

"Damn it, can't you pick some better words for an inspiring speech?" Jean stood up and dusted off his behind. "The woman's got a point. We're going to die anyway now that we're in this hell hole, so why don't we go out blazing, huh? Come on, or we're going to be the spineless cowards they'll mock!"

"R-right!"

* * *

Ruby had to tell herself constantly that it was not a hopeless battle and that she would return to Vale in one piece. After the first hundred times, though, not even she herself believed it. The number of Titans she estimated while at a distance was way too low. There may be only a couple of the larger 30- and 40-foot class Titans, but the courtyard was positively swarming with the smaller ones.

It had begun to rain when they arrived at the Garrison. Cold misery wrapped around both of them, while steam wafted from the Titans. The steam clouds were rather inconvenient, but there was little they could do about it. Using recoil and the projectiles she fired from Crescent Rose to rocket herself through the air, Ruby rolled onto the shoulder of a bigger Titan. The battle had to be an aerial one: there were only two of them but dozens of Titans, so they were bound to get swarmed the moment they land on the ground. Once they cleared the area of the larger threats, they could enter through the broken windows on the bell tower of the Garrison and work their way downwards. At that point, whoever survived inside the Garrison could join them.

But even killing the bigger ones were proving to be an almost insurmountable challenge. After successfully surprising and killing the biggest 40-foot class Titan that was staring into the bell tower, the bigger ones had shifted their attention to Weiss and her. Whether that behavior signaled their intelligence or it showcased their taste for prey was a question that Ruby had no time to ponder, but she would like to think that she drew attention away from the hapless survivors inside the Garrison.

She barely had time to react when a Titan—one with golden hair and eyes—attempted to slap her out of the air. Her Aura flashed a hint of red as Crescent Rose sank into the flesh of the Titan's finger, providing leverage for her next step. The moment she landed against the Titan's palm, its fingers begun to curl inwards as she expected; she immediately leaped backwards, knowing that a white glyph angling upwards had just appeared behind her. The exit of Crescent Rose from the giant's fingers was accompanied by a spurt of steaming red. The tug on her weapon also caused Ruby to backflip into the air, landing directly on the white glyph. It glowed for a brief moment as her feet made contact, and she used the momentum to coil her legs before pushing against the glyph with her feet, releasing all the energy stored in her legs like a spring and shooting her body toward the Titan's neck.

Crescent Rose was pointing behind her. Pulling the trigger twice, Ruby accelerated into a blur, her trail showered with illusory rose petals. The moment Crescent Rose met resistance was the moment it dug into the Titan's soft neck. She reacted accordingly, tilting her body to the left as it came to an abrupt stop and using her own weight to add to the movement of the scythe blade. Like was the case with her first and second kill, she used the scythe to whirl around the Titan's neck, making not one but two circular cuts and severing a gigantic slice of flesh.

"That's two!" She yelled. The giant fell without any noise. She transformed Crescent Rose in midair to release her weapon from its thick neck bone, and then she leaped using the Titan's back of the head as a step. Drawing a graceful arc in the air, she glided with incredible speed toward the roof of the Garrison. A couple more 40-foot Titans remained. They were unfazed by their comrades' deaths, and instead they approached both Ruby and Weiss.

The white princess was relatively safe. Sprinting on the top of the outer wall of the Garrison, she never once lost her balance as she hopped, rolled, and lunged to avoid one after another attempt of a Titan to grab her. Even in the middle of all this chaos, she still kept an eye on Ruby's movements, drawing glyphs whenever she could to aid in her partner's attacks.

The gate to the Garrison was built taller than the rest of the wall. It was built this way because the gate had a windowed watch pylon on each side, inside which soldiers could stay and keep tabs on the surrounding streets. As Weiss came up to it, she skidded to a stop and turned around, fully expecting to be greeted by a Titan's hand. Myrtenaster glowed red as she used her stance to sprint forward. With a clean slice she severed the two bottom fingers of the Titan's hand, and immediately she used her body's weight and momentum to ram the appendages out of her way, essentially slipping out of the giant's grasp.

Ruby landed on the roof with a rather loud thud. The speed of her landing caused her shoes to pulverize the tiles under her, but she paid no mind. Using her legs like coiled springs again, she leaped just before a Titan's hand came down on her, making her escape between its fingers. Firing once more, she released the empty magazine in midair as she glided toward Weiss' location. She had made the Titan that focused its attention on Weiss her next target.

Without any bullets in her scythe and without time to reload her last magazine, she had to rely only on her Semblance for speed. No more would there be boosts in midair to slip away from the Titans until she had a safe place to reload her weapon, and she was well aware of it. She used gravity and her Semblance to accelerate as she dropped from the apex of her trajectory, her weapon angled to strike. It found the nape of the Titan's neck and cut into it, a spurt of steaming crimson squirting from the opening. The moment Crescent Rose caught onto something, Ruby swung her body to the left, using the momentum to whirl herself around the neck once, but she had to disengage as her body reached the back of the Titan's neck once again. There was simply not enough momentum for her to cut another wound channel. She was falling, then, and as expected a white glyph appeared under her to serve as a step. The glyph did not glow as expected when she landed on top of it, however. It blinked once and then gave way, barely slowing Ruby's descent.

"Damn it! RUBY!" Ruby could hear Weiss curse as she fell. The Titan fell with her: apparently two cuts were not necessary to destroy whatever its weakness was inside the nape of its neck. She had no time to entertain that thought, though. Her situation was dire; indeed, without the capability to maneuver in the air, her freedom of movement would be incredibly limited, not to mention that she would have to contend with many more enemies on the ground level, who were gathering around her eventual landing spot even as she fell.

Using her Semblance she accelerated her fall. If she waited, she would have no room to escape. Landing with a roll, she came to a stop right in front of a 10-foot Titan. It reached down with its hand to grab her; it was sheer luck and reflex that she got out of the way with a roll. She knew, however, that neither her luck nor her body was going to last. Some of the Titans swarming the Garrison had already broken off their pursuit and—in their typical shambling gait—wobbled toward her: "Weiss! I need an exit strategy, and fast!"

"I'm… kind of busy here!" Weiss dodged another grabbing attempt. Her life was a bit easier since the number of large Titans that could threaten her had been reduced to only two, but the smaller Titans still roamed free, and those were the ones that Ruby faced. She made a quiet "tut" and spun Myrtenaster's cylinder in its hilt. The rapier let out a high-pitched and glowed an icy blue before she waved, launching a barrage of wispy projectiles that landed directly in front of Ruby. Ice crystals grew wherever they landed, joining together into a thick dome-shaped wall in seconds. She then spun the cylinder to the white chamber, and found it to be completely empty.

"Help me kill the big bastards and then we can reload whenever we want!" Ruby shook free the last magazine she had. The crimson trapezoid felt rather heavy as she slammed it into the magazine well and cocked her rifle. The wall was not going to last for long; every time the Titans outside pounded against it, Ruby could see small shards of ice falling out of the underside of the dome. There was a quiet hissing sound, as well, which was rather disconcerting because it resembled the sound of water sizzling on a hotplate. An arm punched a hole through the wall of ice the moment Ruby finished reloading her weapon, almost showering her with fist-sized pieces of jagged crystals. The arm quickly retracted, and two pairs of eyes stared at her through the hole. She backpedalled a couple of steps until she hit the wall and started sprinting along it.

During the mad dash, Ruby glanced around and processed what she saw. There were multiple smaller Titans, with most of them coming in sizes similar or slightly larger than an Ursa Minor. They were not much slower than an Ursa, as well, but they did not have sharp claws or a mouth full of incisors. What they had, though, was their regeneration capabilities. Although Crescent Rose could decapitate them without a problem, and Ruby was confident that she could turn one of them into a pile of body parts within fifteen seconds, it would not do her much good if they kept coming back to life. They also had the advantage of numbers. There were four small Titans on her trail, three that was cutting her off from the Garrison, and two that was coming at her from the front. During her brief glance around, she did not see any viable routes for her to actually reach the top of the wall or the roof of the building. Before Weiss could help her, she would be on her own.

She mentally thanked whoever gave her the short stature when she ducked and slipped between the legs of a Titan that attempted to grab her. Her scythe flashed in that moment as well; the Titan stumbled, its legs severed below the knee. It fell face-first onto the ground, scalding red liquid spraying out from its stumps. A hastily-spared glance at the body told Ruby that the stumps already had flesh growing into shape. It bought her some time, but not by much.

She skidded to a stop when a palm almost came down on top of her. This was a 10-foot class Titan trying to make a pancake out of her; with one judicious whirl, she cut off the offending hand at above the wrist, and then used the hand as a stepping stone to leap on top of the creature's arm. Her shoes dug into the Titan's soft leathery skin, giving her some traction as she started sprinting upwards, using a single round to maintain her upward momentum. There was barely adequate enough space for her to stand on the shoulder. She gave up the attempt to do so, partly because there was no room for landing and partly because its other hand was coming to grab her. Instead, she hooked the scythe onto its neck and pulled the trigger, using another bullet to sever its head. Just as quickly, she spun in the air, slicing a chunk of meat cleanly off of the stump of the neck.

"That's three!" She landed almost at the same time as the head. More and more Titans had begun to gather around her; there was at least half a dozen coming in one after another from every direction, all of them reaching out to her and all of them intent on turning her into food. Just as well, Ruby smiled and spun like a giant blending blade, severing and tossing aside limbs while leaving behind trails of rose petals.

Weiss, meanwhile, had a small smile of satisfaction when she sliced open the wrist of a big Titan. Powered by violet Dust, Myrtenaster effortlessly carved through flesh and bone, leaving an impossibly clean cut for a rapier. Using the momentum of the cut to sweep the blood off of her blade, she dashed out of the immediate vicinity of the giant, who was then missing both hands but rapidly growing them back, and glanced in Ruby's direction. There were two bigger Titans, and she kept the attention of one of them fairly successfully, but the other one was peeling off and was then moving toward Ruby, who had a small crowd of Titans trying to get at her. She gestured with her blade as it glowed a crimson red; five orbs of fire appeared around her and launched toward the other big Titan in a volley. They succeeded in burning off skin and setting its hair on fire, but they failed to distract it.

Once again letting out a small "tut", Weiss sprinted along the wall to be closer to the fray. Ruby was then among six Titans, each trying to grab her, but she was cutting off pieces of them left and right, leaving bits of flesh and puddles of steaming blood everywhere. Quickly Weiss drew a red glyph on the ground behind a Titan in front of Ruby and shouted: "I got you! Jump!"

Ruby almost did not hear her partner, but it was fortunate that she did. Cutting off the legs of the Titan in front of her, she slipped once again between its legs as it fell and made a mad dash toward the glowing glyph. It blinked when her foot landed on top of it, and then as though she were propelled by some invisible force, Ruby rocketed skywards…

…and she barely had time to reinforce her Aura when a palm collided against her, slapping her out of the air like a fly. Her speed made it impossible to snatch out of the air, so the Titan opted for another method. The wall of the Garrison stopped her flight, but it suffered a rather wide crater on its face at the point of impact. Even with the protection of her Aura, Ruby let out an audible "oof" and bounced back away from the wall before gravity took its hold on her. She landed with a light thud at the root of the wall.

"Ruby—ARGH!" Weiss could not worry about Ruby. The other Titan had almost regenerated its hands; the speed of its healing surprised Weiss somewhat, and although it could not grab Weiss, its bony fingers was enough to brush her aside like a speck of dust. A burst of steamy wind bounced her along the wall several times before she came to a stop at the guard tower in a pile.

"Damn it…" Ruby groaned. Even with the protection from her Aura, she knew she was hurt pretty badly. It seemed that she could still feel pain from every part of her body, though whether or not that was a good thing was up for debate. Crescent Rose landed tip-first some distance away, its horizontal shaft pointing at her body. She was blinded for a moment when she tried to move, her entire body complaining about her recklessness, but there was no other course of action.

She had to stand. She had to move. She had to fight. Otherwise…

…otherwise, she was going to end up like Thomas, like Mina…

…like Eren.

White heat seared her vision as she tried to reach out once again. The shaft of Crescent Rose was just out of reach; she flailed a little, but all she achieved was letting out a sharp yelp of pain and slapping the earth as hard as she could. Trying to stand yielded no results, either. Her arms could not support her body: it was simply too much.

Through her blurry vision, she could see humanoid shapes approaching her in their characteristically shambling gait. A dark shape of a palm descended over her.

"I hate cloudy days," Ruby murmured.


	4. Chapter 4

Author's Notes:

1. Chapter 3 didn't get reviews. I don't know what that means. Did you not like it because it was too dark, or that the RWBY team seemed powerless against the Titans?

2. I know that there's been a lot of rehashing of things that happened in Attack on Titans with slight variations or with no variations. A lot of it is done so that people who haven't watched/read AoT have some context on what's going on. The next chapter will be the end of the Battle of Trost. Ruby and company won't be participating the battle to retake Trost. They need to work out some things now that they have a break of sorts. Things will start differentiating then, and more RWBY lore will be weaved in. Stay tuned!

3. Dust, or no Dust, that is indeed the question. Either way is acceptable to me, and either way is interesting from an author's perspective. It's the only thing that is preventing me from finishing up the next chapter. Any input is appreciated.

* * *

Mikasa flew forward, her eyes trained on the swarmed Garrison. The buildings of Trost District were largely intact because the civilian population had all been evacuated, and battle damage between soldiers from the Garrison and the Titans were not that extensive. Still, humanity paid a hefty price that day: the vanguard and middle guard of the Garrison in Trost were annihilated.

So what? She asked herself. So what if they were annihilated? So what if humanity lost Trost? What cared she even if they were to lose the entire territory inside Wall Rose?

She fired her wires forward and swung her body, accelerating using gravity while continuing to push her velocity faster with gas. Titans—dozens of them—were well below her on the street among the littered remains of unfortunate soldiers. They regarded her with hungry eyes, but she was well out of their reach. There were several 8-meter class Titans around, as well, and they had begun to converge to her path of movement: a beeline toward the Garrison complex.

One of them was awfully close to her. Its giant palm attempted to grab her in mid-air, but she instead anchored her wires in its exposed shoulder and slipped between its thumb and index finger. Without touching the Titan even with her feet, she sailed past its shoulder line to the nape of the neck. Her blades made clean cuts on its disgusting flesh and cleaved a chunk off of it. She turned in mid-air as the chunk detached from the Titan's neck before launching her wires again, never even stopping for a moment. The wires anchored themselves into a rooftop when the Titan fell with a loud crash, and she started sprinting the moment she landed on the rooftop.

Disgusting creatures. Despicable creatures. Detestable creatures.

Die.

You who took Eren from me.

You who took my surrogate family from me!

YOU WHO TOOK EVERYTHING FROM ME!

DIE!

She pursed her lips before leaping off the edge of the roof. Not even the two strangely-dressed girls were able to keep up with her. The group of recruits had been left far behind her, and she was about half-way to the Garrison. Straining her eyes, she could see a red whirl and a white figure near the Garrison, dancing and avoiding the Titans as they attacked them. She still remembered the girl with the red cape; she assumed that the red whirl was her.

But it mattered not who they were, what they wanted, or whether or not they would even survive; Mikasa grunted as she swung herself onto another rooftop before immediately launching into the air again, her speed ever increasing. There was another large Titan in her way. Furrowing her brows, she almost crouched as she ran across the rooftop. The Titan's attack was clumsy and slow as usual; turning and spinning her body in mid-air, she avoided it by the breadth of a hair, her waist only inches from the tip of its middle finger. During the spin, she launched her wires at the Titan's face. They lodged into its forehead, securing a rather solid hold. Using this, she dragged herself over its head, varying the speed of each reel to orient herself into the correct position when she finally vaulted over it.

She grunted as she cut open the Titan's neck with her blades. They broke apart in the process, but they got the job done. Without even slowing down a little bit, she kicked against the neck, leaping over the chasm between it and the next row of houses and landing into a roll. Casually detaching the disposable blades from the handles, she fastened the last pair of usable blades from the boxes on her gear in the middle of a glide after exiting the roll that softened her landing. There were around three to four 7-meter Titans in her way, but the Garrison was only minutes away from her if she proceeded at this speed.

The wind blasted in her ears at the incredible speed she was travelling. Rain pelted her body, its drops hitting her face like small pebbles. Her body reacted automatically as her feet landed on the roof, sending itself into another leap that turned into a glide across the street. Although the zigzag nature of the route lengthened the distance she needed to cover, the speed at which she moved through the air was more than enough to make up the difference. Plus, she could then observe and be aware of her surroundings without taking her eyes off of the target.

A Titan entered her field of vision from a side street to the right. She was headed in that direction as well, and it was in her path. Her wires lodged into the giant's shoulder only after it raised its arms and swept across in the air. It wanted to swat her out of the sky so that it could pick her up and eat her while she was paralyzed.

How foolish.

Mikasa leaped high up without retracting her wires. Having her wires pull her made her trajectory predictable to the Titan; plus, it gave her little freedom of movement on her vertical center axis. When she was about to come into violent contact with the colossal hand, she swung her swords, cutting off a pair of fingers. The cuts spurted scalding scarlet, covering her with blood as the swing went past her, and she immediately retracted the wires before they started to fall. Flipping over the giant's shoulder, she launched the wires again at its neck before carving a piece of meat off of it.

Mikasa landed on the roof across the side street. Giving no glance at the steaming corpse, she broke into a mad sprint again. Even though she had been exerting herself vigorously for hours during the day, there was no fatigue. All she could hear was her heartbeat, all she could feel the blood in her veins. Pulsating, beating, and thrumming, her body and mind urged her. There was but one way, one direction, one destination.

Forward.

Forward!

FORWARD!

She leaped again and pressed the trigger on her sword handle. The grappling hooks launched, but there was not the usual kick it had against her hips. They never had enough force to embed themselves anywhere, instead succumbing to gravity into a limp fall toward the ground. At the same time, she felt the Gear sputter and die. She had run out of gas.

Drawing a parabolic arc in the air, she landed on a roof for the last time, and then the landing turned into a tumble as one of her ankles gave. There was little she could do to control her body after that: the speed was simply too great for her to stop. All she could do was to stop her blades from hurting her accidentally; fortunately, they snapped and broke after smashing their flat sides against the roofing tiles with excessive force.

Her body bounced a couple of times before it rolled off of the slanted surface and down onto the shoddily-sewn canvas awning of a deserted fruit stand. Her weight plus her momentum was enough to tear open the threads: she crashed into the stand into a rather embarrassing position, like a vagrant queen sitting on her imaginary throne made out of refuse.

Every muscle in her body screamed at her for her recklessness. She twitched a little before her eyes opened reluctantly. Warm liquid flowed into one of them; she deduced that she had to have hurt her head somewhere during the tumble.

She was soaked. In fact, it had only recently stopped raining. How could she have not noticed it? It was the same as that day. It was the same as that day when she met him, that day when she too lost her family.

She had a good life; Mikasa smiled. Before she met him, and after she met him, her life was colorful, peaceful, and happy. She enjoyed his company. She enjoyed the time they spent together, whether it be times they spent picking up firewood, or the time they spent training in the camp.

The ground shuddered as death inevitably approached. Mikasa held out her hand, her grip still firmly on the handles of her broken sword. She had a blade that day, too. And he…

She shivered. Slipping onto the road, she took only a handful of steps before her knees gave. The rush from all the action wore off, and intense fatigue hit her like a jackhammer. Her past seemed to have a way of repeating itself, she chuckled; she was even holding her weapon the same way.

It was something she would never forget. One moment, she was asking her mother how she came to exist after she was given the family crest on her wrist; the next moment there was blood, screaming, and burly men with pale skin trying to take her away. Her father was lying in a pool of blood at the door, and… and her mother was going berserk. She had never seen her gentle, loving mother freak out like that; she grabbed a knife and threw herself at the strangers at the door, screaming hysterically while trying to stab them.

She, too, soon lay in a pool of blood. Her eyes never closed as life flowed out of the gash on her neck. She tried to reach for her daughter to shield her from what was to come, but strength escaped her too quickly. The blond man walked over her corpse and grabbed Mikasa's collar, uttering some words that she did not hear. The next thing Mikasa remembered, she was lying on the wooden floor of a strange run-down shack, her hands and feet bound too tightly with ropes.

Her body was cold. Her body was hurting. She could taste blood in her mouth. There were two other men in the room, those that murdered her parents. One was rather muscular with blond hair; he was the one that struck her mother in the neck. The one that sat in the chair behind her had a rather rotund belly, though he was also well-built, with enough mass to restrain her if she dared escape. They were talking about something, Mikasa remembered. The conversation went along the routes of selling her to perverts to fetch a high price, that she was the last of her kind, and that her mother was worth a lot more money but she was killed. The moment she woke up, there was a foot stomping on her stomach, and she coughed weakly.

Where would she run to? Everything was taken from her: her father, her mother, her home… her freedom. She may as well wait until she was sold, and suffer for whatever little life she had left. Not that she had a choice in the matter.

The door squeaked open. Both men were startled, but neither moved to grab a weapon.

"Excuse me…" It was the voice of a small boy, still too young to have turned masculine. He was a rather scrawny boy who was barely ten years old. His hair was messy like the nest of a bird. He was wearing a dirt-colored tunic over a white linen shirt, and a pair of dark brown pants. There were some scrapes on his arm, and his face was dirtied.

"Oi, what the hell are you doing here?" The burly man walked toward the door. He was visibly more relaxed than earlier; perhaps the figure of a child in the door caused him to lower his guard?

"Um, I was lost in the forest, and… and I saw this house here, so I thought…" The boy stammered.

The man glanced behind him at his partner in crime, who gave him a light nod. The boy looked rather meek, and he did have a feminine side to him; perhaps they could have a good bonus on top of the compensation they would be getting for the job. He put on a predatory smile: "Hey, that's no good! Why don't you come with us? There're wolves in the forest, you know—!"

"Yeah. Turns out they can't outsmart humans." The boy's soft voice hardened into steel like the glint of light that erupted from the man's back. Mikasa could see scarlet liquid drip and stream from the tip of the blade before the boy pulled it out from the sack of meat he just stabbed.

The other man bolted up from his makeshift throne, knocking it down in the process. He glanced around frantically, searching for something he could use to defend himself. Fully expecting the boy to charge in while the other man was unarmed, Mikasa was rather surprised to hear the door click shut following a long and painful creak from its hinges.

He finally laid his hands on a hand axe. He walked as quietly as possible, but the half-rotten floor creaked with his every step under his substantial mass. There was not only nervousness and fear, but a little confidence in him as well; he was, after all, much bigger than the boy and he was armed. Deep down, Mikasa feared for the boy's life. There was no way—

The man opened the door with one swing, only to see the boy charge at him. The boy was not unarmed, either; during the time that he was outside the door, he managed to fasten the knife to the handle of a stick, turning it into a makeshift spear. With a ferocious battle cry, the boy almost slammed into the man. The mass of his target was not an impediment; he shoved back the sack of meat until the tip of the spear hit a wall. The string fastening the spear head to the shaft twisted as the blade itself stabbed into the wall. The rod slid forward and rammed itself into the wound the knife made until the wall stopped it as well, lubricated by whatever liquid came out of the wound. Paying it no mind, the boy pulled the rod back and tossed it aside before pulling out the knife from the bloodied man.

The man clutched his wound before falling forward. The spear and the stick made a mess of his thick, fat torso, poking a rather large bleeding hole through it. He was in shock, Mikasa could see, but there was little time for him to respond, because the small scrawny boy was already on top of him, the bloodied knife in hand.

"JUST DIE, SCUMBAG! THIS IS WHAT YOU DESERVE! DON'T YOU EVER WAKE UP AGAIN!" He screamed at the top of his lungs. The cold glint of the blade did not blind Mikasa. She followed its movements as it crashed into the man's face, neck, chest, and stomach. The boy was stabbing him again and again, as though the man would not truly die until he had been turned into minced meat.

Mikasa never looked away. After what seemed like quite a long time, the body under the boy did not move again. He stopped and stood up, blood having soaked his tunic and hands. Mikasa looked directly into his eyes; there was neither fear nor remorse, but simple determination.

They were simply stunning.

"You're going to be okay now," She felt her restraints loosen. He had moved behind her and cut the ropes that bound her hands and feet. The blade and his hands felt slick from the blood that covered them. She did not hate the feeling. "You must be Mikasa, right? I'm Eren, Dr. Jeager's son. I think you've already met my dad.

"He came for the appointment your parents made, and I was tagging along, and that was when we…" Mikasa rubbed her wrists. Eren's reassuring voice was fading in her ears. Something was off. There were two corpses in the room, but…

"There should be three of them," Mikasa realized at the same time the floor creaked. Footsteps echoed down the halls. By the time Eren looked up, the third man was already looming over the two children.

"Those were my friends you just killed, you mangy little brat!" There was no time to react, but Eren tried to reach for the knife anyway. The man's foot caught Eren on the stomach and kicked his small, frail body into the blood-stained wall. He charged toward the boy, who had collapsed into a heap on the ground, and picked him up with one hand. Cursing and screaming, he wrapped his hands around Eren's neck, and slammed him against the wall before he started to tighten his grip. "I'm gonna kill you! I'm gonna fucking kill you, you bastard!"

Eren tried to kick the man in the chest, but his legs could not reach far enough. Instead of staring into the man's eyes, he was looking at Mikasa. Their eyes met, his steel grey meeting her onyx black; one pair was dead, and the other pair was alive.

"Fight!" The boy squeezed the word between his teeth. He was fighting: kicking, scratching, punching, he was doing everything he could to get out of the man's choke hold.

"Fight!" He said again, this time shifting his eyes toward the knife. As if she were under some strange charm spell, Mikasa's body moved even though she was frightened. Reaching for the bloodied knife, she picked it up, only to almost drop it on her lap because her hands were trembling.

"If we don't fight, we can't win!" As Eren struggled to speak these words, Mikasa whimpered. The handle of the knife felt sticky because the blood on it was starting to dry. She was standing with the knife in hand, then. She was trembling every time her heart pounded against her chest; her mouth tasted bitter and metallic.

The man was about to take Eren's life, like he and his "friends" took her parents.

Like a spider taking the life of a butterfly.

Like a praying mantis taking the life of a cricket.

Like a dragonfly taking the life of a gnat.

She had seen those predators countless times. Nature was filled with these things. Animals preyed on each other. Eat, or be eaten. Kill, or be killed.

Why?

Because the world was a cruel, cruel place.

Mikasa was standing like she was back then. She also had the stub of her sword in her hand, like the knife she held back then. She looked at the hand descending onto her from the Titan in front of her for a brief moment, having tasted the same metallic bitterness in her mouth.

And then, light returned to her eyes. With lightning speed she slashed at the Titan's palm, drawing blood by cutting a long gash in its tough skin with the tip of her broken sword. At the same time, her legs were suddenly filled with strength, and she hopped backwards, narrowly avoiding the Titan's grab.

But why?

Why was her body moving?

The giant monster did not know pain. The other hand came swooping down at Mikasa, who dropped and rolled to the side, once again narrowly getting out of the attempt to grab her. She quickly glanced behind her. It was a small bend between two streets with a ruined statue in the center. As a result, she could not backpedal much anymore. She could enter the street to her right, but there was another Titan there, and it was moving toward her with thunderous footsteps.

For what purpose was she prolonging her existence?

She was content. There was nothing for her in this world any more. There was nothing to live for, nothing to look forward to. Tomorrow would bring only misery and death.

Why could she not stop?

She was out of gas to climb onto the rooftops, and at the same time she was out of space to move. Mikasa lowered her body; with her stubby blade remnants, she could potentially carve off some meat from the Titan's hand and forge a path from under it. Of course, that ran the risk of the Titan accidentally kicking her to her death or stepping on her, not to mention that it could simply scoop her up with her hand, but there was no other option.

And then, to her surprise, a bright burning ember drew a streak through the air and crashed into the Titan's face.

* * *

Anka Rheinberger stood along the wall of the long gallery surrounding the cloistered garden in the middle of Marquis Bart's residence. The Lord's home was a castle-like structure in the middle of a small moat, with a stone bridge connecting it with the rest of the territories inside Wall Rose. The Marquis was influential and wealthy, but he was a fool, Anya sighed in her mind; if a moat would have stopped Titans from advancing, then they would have dug moats to reclaim lost territory already.

The castle was a rather lavish construction, situated as it was in the middle of one of the most valuable pieces of land inside Wall Rose. The walls around the middle structures were at least 10 meters high, and the place was big enough to be able to act as a combined armory, supply depot, and barracks for the military if it was needed. A shame it was, that it was used to raise and house someone like Marquis Bart.

He was exactly as how Anka would imagine an incompetent inheritor of immense riches. In fact, sometimes she wonder if her impression of him had distorted the way she looked at the ruling class. The man was a bloated mass of flesh, one that would make a fine ball for children to play with if his radius shrunk a few feet. Such a sphere was dressed in the finest silk and cotton with threads of gold and silver. The price tag on his clothing could probably buy a house in Trost with some to spare, she thought.

Sitting opposite to the noble was Dot Pixis, the Supreme Commander of the Garrison forces and her boss. His face was filled with folds and creases as befitting a man of his age, but perhaps he had aged a little too much in the past five years. He had no hair on his scalp, showing off proudly his almost reflective round skull, but he did retain a perfectly groomed silver-grey moustache on top of his lips.

Anka wondered what her boss was thinking when he accepted the invitation to the noble's residence to play chess with him every month. He was the polar opposite to the fat bastard, yet he had the patience to hang out with him. Sure, the Commander had always been an eccentric man with a strange taste for everything from liquor to people, but sometimes even she could not fathom what he thought, even after being his assistant for over five years. And…

"Hey, are you even paying attention? See, I win again!" The fat Marquis lifted one of his rooks and took the Commander's pawn with a giant grin on his face as if he had just accomplished some incredible feat. Anya suppressed a wince; she had to remain neutral because not only was the nobleman watching, his equally well-dressed accomplices were also observing their every move.

"Even though I'm gracious enough to stoop to train you every month, you never improve, Pixis," he continued. Anka was not well versed in chess at all, but even she could see a couple of brazenly obvious moves that the Commander could have taken some time ago to ensure the noble's defeat. There were holes all over his "strategy", if she could even call it that. It was obvious that the Commander was merely indulging him, and he was either too stupid to realize it, or smart enough not to break the fact.

"Yeah, I'm still no match for you, Lord Bart," the Commander rubbed his bald head. The Marquis almost choked on the wine he swallowed when he laughed to his satisfaction. Anka glanced at his aides; they too had smug smiles on their faces, as if they were somehow superior because their master had done something incredible.

"Aren't you the supreme commander of the Garrison forces?" With his grubby hands, the Marquis grabbed greedily a handful of beautifully prepared cookies presented to them on delicate silverware. Clustering them into a stack like an ordinary people would make a sandwich, he took a bite into them and chewed rather loudly, tossing aside the usual manner that was expected from men of his stature. "How are you going to handle the Titans if you're as incompetent as that?"

Anka could almost hear Gustav's muscles tense at those words. The tall man had been standing beside her the whole time. Both of them served under Commander Pixis as his assistants: he mainly handled training and deployment while she handled logistics, but their areas of responsibilities overlapped often enough that they worked well together. He was not one to stand for such crude insults at the Commander, but she knew that Gustav too understood the consequences that a wrongly uttered sentence could bring.

"Commander Pixis!" The Commander was poised to respond, but a panicked call from the entrance to the gallery made him hold his thought. A young face that Anka did not recognize appeared, wearing the uniform of the Garrison like she and the Commander did. It seemed that he had sprinted the distance here; his chest heaved up and down in an attempt to facilitate speech. His Gear on his hips rattled as he took every step, and eventually he came to a stop at attention slightly to the back of the Commander's seat.

"Who are you? How dare you interrupt our game—" The Marquis was positively furious.

"The Colossal Titan was spotted outside the Trost District!" Anka's heart sank a bit at these words. The room was silent enough that she could hear the drop of a needle. Even the Marquis' frivolous indignation was no match for the weight of the news.

"It has already destroyed the gate!" And with those words, the Marquis' grip on his wine glass slipped. The ornate crystalline container shattered on contact with the tiled floor, spilling its cerise content. Anka could not help but let out a small gasp. The news was grave, indeed, if even the Marquis needed no elaboration on its importance. She eyed his aides. They neither concealed their shock nor retained their composure, having turned their smug smile upside down and literally began shaking in their boots.

Silence reigned in the room for but a moment before the sound of the chair sliding on the floor broke it. The Commander rose from the chess table, grabbing the Marquis' wine bottle in the progress. Taking a long gulp directly from the bottle, he smiled and savored the drink: "Mm, what fine taste in wine you have, my lord! It will indeed be my honor to take it with me into battle."

"Oi, wait, Pixis! I said wait!" The Marquis was indignant. Both Anka and Gustav bowed and followed as Commander Pixis turned around and started strolling nonchalantly toward the exit. They had walked quite far down the cloistered gallery before the noble caught up, his rotund body shaking from the slight exertion of his waddle. Sweat decorated his oily face like beads on a rather unseemly piece of wax paper, and new beads formed with each strained pant he gave: "I shall not allow you to leave! You must gather your forces and defend our property to the last man! Isn't that your duty?"

"Marquis Bart," the Commander abruptly turned around, and the Marquis collided into the old man. Strangely, it was the Marquis—and not the much slimmer Commander—that fell onto his rear. "My men are risking their lives in Trost right now. I must go to them."

"Commander, I will have your horse readied," Anya said, walking ahead toward the stable. As surprising as it was that the Commander decided to waste precious time in order to give the Marquis a well-deserved lecture, she could not let it delay their response.

"It is likely that many have already made the ultimate sacrifice in the defense of humanity," the Commander continued, staring straight into the fat noble's fear-addled eyes, "and I am certain that many more are dying this very moment as we indulge in inconsequential small talk."

"They're expendable! Let them die! Isn't that their purpose?" The Marquis finally collected enough air to stand up, but even then his legs were trembling. "And you've never even won at chess! Who do you think you're kidding? You aren't going to make any difference even if you go!"

"Please do not worry about the Commander's abilities, my lord," Gustav added, leering coldly at the Marquis' bald greasy scalp, "it is unnecessary for the Commander to hold back in a real battle against the Titans."

"That's enough, Gustav," the Commander raised his hands to halt his aide from expressing himself further. The fat bastard's face finally changed to something that fitted him better, Anka gave a silent smile as she glanced back. Commander Pixis then gave a bow, and spoke in the calm voice that he had used since the beginning of this charade: "Marquis Bart, please enjoy your peaceful day as you have always done."

And then, they turned to leave, not heeding any desperate wails that were directed at them.

Because they had a job to do.

* * *

Yang could not keep up with Mikasa's speed. It was but a blink of an eye and she was already a few dozen feet in the lead, and then in the next blink the Titan in front of them fell, having a chunk of meat carved out from its neck. The speed at which she travelled would put her in about the same league as Ruby was, but it was all the more impressive because Mikasa never had any access to Dust or Semblance. Pure physical training and conditioning could do some amazing things, the blonde thought with a small smile. As far as she understood, Mikasa was the best of the best among the trainees, and the woman with short black hair was backing up the opinion with little room left for doubt.

There was something odd, though. If she understood the situation correctly—and she was pretty sure she did—not a lot of people would have much gas left in their Maneuver Gear system. Since gas was essential in driving the Gear to allow them the freedom of maneuvering in a third dimension, and such freedom was essential to survive against Titans, none of them would have much left. Despite this, Mikasa seemed to be charging forward with reckless abandon, moving ever faster forward until she was but a small figure in Yang's vision.

"She's moving too fast!" Armin yelled. The blond boy was behind her to her left. Blake was to her right hand side, and Conny was following Blake closely behind. Both of them had mastery of the Maneuver Gear, though they were moving at just a fraction of Mikasa's speed.

"What?" Rain pelted Yang's body, and the wind made it harder to hear the boy's words, but she was fairly sure that Armin was thinking of the same thing as she was.

"Mikasa's using too much gas! At this rate, she'll run out of gas soon!" Armin yelled again. "It doesn't matter how good she is! If she runs out of gas, it'll be over for her!"

It was at that moment that Mikasa's gear sputtered and died. The small blot that was her body fell down and tumbled on a roof, but it never got back up again. The ace of the Trainee Squad—nay, the ace of the Garrison—had finally run out of fuel.

"God damn it!" Yang snarled. The entire District of Trost was then Titan territory; the streets were swarming with smaller 10-foot classes and dotted with the larger 20- and 30-foot giants. If Mikasa were fortunate, she would have come to a stop on a rooftop and escape most of the smaller Titans. But then again, fortune seemed to never smile on these people, Yang reminded herself bitterly. Gritting her teeth, she kicked the roof under her and crossed the street, dashing toward Mikasa's landing spot: "Blake, come with me! We can't leave her like this!"

"What about Ruby and Weiss? They're still fighting at the Garrison!"

"That's what the rest of these jocks are for! Armin and Buzzcut, you two, follow us! She's gonna need gas! We'll catch up with the main group when we get her!" Yang ordered without leaving room for questioning. The rooftops had become slippery due to the rain, but the reduced friction was actually to Yang's advantage as she slid from one roof to another, using the slant of the roof to reduce her exertion. For all she knew, there would be quite a few tough fights in front of her.

It was but a moment before they actually got to Mikasa's crash site. Finding her was easy enough; she left a long skid mark on the roof, tumbled down to a broken piece of awning, and then crashed into a fruit stand. Rescuing her, on the other hand, was another matter. Titans were already beginning to converge on her position. Yang spotted a 20-foot class shambling toward Mikasa's motionless body. Following that large Titan, about half a dozen small Titans were on their way toward the defenseless woman.

"My weapon isn't going to do anything against that Titan, and we're running out of time!" Ember Celica could only cause superficial damage to the Titan of its size with its shells. It needed to be distracted from consuming Mikasa for Conny or Armin to get her away from being devoured, but Ember Celica alone could not give the Titan enough of a pause.

Armin gulped. Yang could notice his swords rattling because the boy's hands were shaking. Even so, he took a step forward and stood beside her, his eyes set on the giant enemy: "If you hit it in the eyes, it'll pause for long enough that someone can grab her from under its palms. I haven't done much since I—"

"No," Yang reassured the blond boy with a pat on his shoulder and a soft smile. "You guys need to save your gas. I'll distract it, and you guys can grab her, give her some gas, and head to the Garrison."

"We got two large Titans plus about a dozen small ones to deal with," Blake drew Gambol Shroud and pointed toward the other side of the street with her scabbard, "someone'll need to distract that one, too, or it'd be our problem five minutes later."

Yang took a look at the ribbon fastening the katana-pistol to Blake's wrist, and she had an idea: "Blake, remember how we killed that Nevermore back in the forest?"

"Yeah, we used my ribbon as a slingshot, Weiss' glyphs to pave a path on a cliff, and Ruby's scythe to behead it at the top of the cliff…!" Blake nodded before the ray of realization hit her. "You want to try that here? I don't have the fine control we need to make sure you hit the target! And what if you fly straight into the Titan's mouth? That thing's got some huge teeth!"

"I'll adjust my course in flight with Ember Celica, so we should be fine. I've seen Ruby fly a few times, after all; there's no reason I can't steal her tricks," Yang patted Blake's shoulder this time before turning toward Conny and Armin, who were listening in and were trying to pick their jaws up from the floor: "you guys fancy lending a hand?"

"This is insane! You're not seriously building a giant slingshot!" Conny exclaimed, his face flushed bright red through exertion. They managed to find a piece of roof with direct line of sight at the Titan's face not far from where they were. Blake fastened Gambol Shroud on a jutting stub of a chimney, and she herself were about twenty yards away behind an exposed attic. The ribbon was stretched taut with plenty of rooftop behind it. The two trainees were doing their best holding onto Gambol Shroud, making sure that it would not dislodge easily from the chimney.

"You've got giant man-eating monsters roaming a populated town, huge-assed walls fencing your people in, not to mention the danger of going extinct! Tell me, what isn't insane?" Yang leaned back into the ribbon, testing its flexibility. It was like an elastic band on a children's sling, though she wished she could instead ride in the cup of a trebuchet. Taking a deep breath, she set her eyes on the Titan's face, and started backpedalling, stretching the ribbon further and further.

"You're good! Make this count!" There was little holding Yang in place except her shoes, her arms, and her Aura-enhanced abdominal muscles leaning into the tense ribbon. She gripped it tightly; it had stretched to the point that she swore she could hear it tearing in various places. Sweet release came a brief moment later as the tension in the entire system was released in one massive burst, propelling Yang forward at incredible speed. Her trajectory arched just a little, and somehow the Titan did her a favor by moving straight into her path.

"EAT THIS!" Yang let out a ferocious roar. Her Semblance activated along with her anger, shrouding her entire body in a ball of flame. Her left fist crashed into the Titan's nose along with her entire body, giving it pause. The flames burst into an explosion, but not before she plunged her right fist into the eyeball of the Titan. The fire around her fist boiled the liquid inside the eye, letting out a huge gout of steam when she pulled out from the squishy tissue. She then kicked on the Titan's face and back-flipped in midair, landing in front of a stunned Mikasa with both feet and her left hand.

"Mikasa, are you okay?" Yang's hair was burning. Her irises had turned crimson, and her fists too were on fire. The Titan in front was clutching its face, the steam from its eye socket forming a plume between its fingers: it was immobilized for the moment, but given the rate of regeneration these abominations had, it would not be long.

"Armin! Conny!" As if on cue, the two trainees appeared seemingly out of nowhere, landing at Mikasa's side. Taking one arm each, they propped Mikasa up by slinging her arms around their necks, and aimed their Gears toward the rooftop.

"Three, two, one—fuck!" Both of them pulled the trigger at the same time, though only Armin's wires flew out with any measure of distance. Conny's wires launched a short distance before falling impotently onto the ground, barely reaching the edge of the roof. "I'm out too!"

"What—I'll get Mikasa to safety first and then I'll get you!"

"No, you've got to save your gas! Get her to safety and then go for the Garrison!" Conny shook Mikasa free, letting her hang onto Armin's equally diminutive body. "Yang, you too! I'm done for anyway! Leave me here!"

"If anyone's gonna die, it… it should be me!" Armin snapped back at Conny, "Both of you are top ten in the squad! If we're going to retake the Garrison, we need the best! You don't need to worry about me!"

"Don't be stupid! You can't swap out your cylinders now! Get her out of here!"

"Shut up, both of you! Nobody else dies today! Blake!" The moment Yang finished her sentence, Blake appeared over the back of the Titan's neck. Landing on top of the near-vertical surface, she swung both Gambol Shroud and its razor-sharp scabbard like Mikasa did, cleaving off a clean chunk of flesh from its neck. The brief moment of contact was all she needed; before gravity took hold of her, she kicked against the Titan's neck and flipped in mid-air before launching Gambol Shroud toward a chimney, pulling herself back onto the rooftop with the ribbon's elasticity.

The Titan fell forward, landing directly at the place the four people were. Yang dodged to the right, and the three trainees went to the left, narrowly avoiding being crushed. Though the larger Titan was dead, it brought a new problem. It was the only thing blocking the smaller Titans from swarming the group. Now that it was removed from the picture, several 10-foot class Titans were already closing in, almost at the pace of a sprint.

"Go! I got this!" Yang left no space for arguments. She hissed a smile: the enemies approaching them were in sizes closer to what she was used to fighting. The first small Titan tried to grab her as was typical of small Titans. She tucked herself into a ball, rolled under its arm to right in front of it and gave it a solid punch in the nethers before sweeping her leg along the ground. The force of the sweeping kick was enough to dislodge the small Titan's footing and it fell backwards, having lost its balance. She then turned upside down and whirled her body around. Her leg caught a second Titan in its waist: her aura-enhanced strength was not enough to fold the Titan in half, but there was an almost audible crack as its spinal column dislocated and snapped the nerve inside. The third Titan who dared approach her was sent almost flying with a square punch on the jaw.

Yang panted a little. She was conserving what little ammunition she had left, so the punches were not as powerful as she would have liked. Still, these smaller Titans were about the same size as an Ursa, and their protection was nowhere close to the thick exoskeleton of the scorpion-shaped Death Stalkers, nor were they as maneuverable as the vulture-like Nevermores.

They were practically oversized practice dummies.

"Get out of here, now!" She spared a glance behind her at Armin. The blond boy nodded; even he knew that it was no time for him to hesitate. Yang smiled as he took off from the ground, and then she shifted her focus back to the Titans in front of her. Vicious as her attacks were, she knew she was not inflicting lethal damage on these practice dummies. Indeed, all of them had begun regenerating, snapping bones back into place and repairing burns on their skins and muscle. More Titans were approaching from the front and the back, and Conny was still on the ground.

She had no time to observe Blake, but she knew that her partner was doing all she could. Aerial maneuvering options for her is limited: Gambol Shroud worked best if there were support beams or branches overhead that she could use to suspend and swing from, but that was not available in open terrain like here. Without Weiss' support glyphs, there were no points in mid-air that Blake could use to brace herself and change directions. Given the limitations, Blake had done well for herself, having successfully distracted the larger Titan with her afterimages that she could circle to behind it. Lodging Gambol Shroud into the Titan's shoulder, she pulled herself to land on top of it in but a moment, and gave it a fatal strike.

Due to the massive difference in height, Yang's punches landed mostly in the waist and hip area. She found that kicks to the back of the ankle served well to destabilize the Titan's stance, just like it would when used against humans. The mass and size of the giants meant that she had to pour much force into each kick; her Aura flared almost visibly whenever one landed. Though the way the Titans fell prevented Yang from giving it a killing blow by striking the back of the neck, she did not insist on killing them: Ember Celica would only inflict superficial damage, anyway. What she did was to cause enough damage with her bare hands so that the Titans did not get up immediately. That included breaking bones, tearing out tendons, and causing large patches of severe burns with her Semblance. Still, the number of Titans gathered around the group was only increasing and she was on the verge of being overwhelmed.

"You should just leave me here! Don't throw your life away! Go help your partners!" Conny pleaded as Yang landed another solid punch on a Titan. The punch was not enough to penetrate its skin, but the impact force was enough to shatter the bone inside, causing the soft flesh that formed the leg's shape to twist and bend.

"If I didn't do something when I could have, I won't be able to live with myself!" Yang responded tersely in between violent collisions of her limbs and the Titans'. She was panting then; even though her Aura greatly enhanced her strength, she still needed to exert herself when she fought, and that stamina that had been sustaining her was draining quicker than she would have liked.

"Yang, we can't keep this up forever! We need an exit strategy and fast!" Behind her, Blake danced between rooftops, leaving behind one shadow copy after another to confuse her prey—another big Titan that shambled toward the group. She, too, was tiring, as her bursts of speed to avoid Titans' sweeps and to transit between rooftops were getting fewer and further between. Blake was the second fastest in the group, only slightly slower than Ruby when she was not using her Semblance to accelerate herself, and she was also the most nimble. Without Semblance or the help of Dust, however, all of that speed was based on her own physical conditioning. The moment she would run out of her metaphorical "gas" would be her most vulnerable, and she could not take a lot of punishment like Yang could.

Yang chuckled bitterly. If even Blake could not think of something like that, then their situation had become truly desperate. Her partner could surely escape from the scene, but she—and Conny—could not make it without help. Armin and Mikasa had the only canisters that still had gas between the three recruits. They had to conserve what they had in order to retake the Garrison; not wasting any on lost causes like Conny or her was the rational decision.

She kicked a fallen Titan's jaw as hard as she could. She hooked the tip of her boot into the jaw and almost ripped it out from its face, but the joints proved to be too sturdy a pair to dislodge. The interruption of the flow halted her movements abruptly, and she barely had time to unhook her boot and stumble into a fall backward to avoid a sweep from a Titan that had already recovered from its tendon damage.

"Shit," she breathed. There was no time for her to get back up. There were around three or four Titans that were closing in on her in almost all directions, and the only way she could move was backwards. A hand came sweeping in, and there was neither space nor time to avoid being grabbed.

She felt as if her body was being squeezed with a set of heated clamps. Her skin burned on contact, being seared by the unnaturally high body heat the Titan generated, and she cried. Her Aura flared to react to the pressure being exerted upon her rib cage, and it barely held its shape. Breathing was difficult; every breath worked against the wall of flesh crushing her.

Ruby's face flashed before her eyes. Her little sister had grown to become a talented leader and a seasoned fighter, with determination and purpose unlike any other. The decision to sacrifice herself to help these people—though made in the heat of the moment—was not ill-advised; indeed, if Yang herself was in the position, she would have done the same. Her lips curled upwards at the thought: at least, without her the team would not be at too much of a loss.

Then again, she never wanted to see Ruby cry. Her sister never cried much in her life no matter what adversity seemed to hit, but even then Yang knew that she would have done the same if Ruby was lost to her.

And so she began to struggle. Her Aura increased in intensity, and she wriggled her body against the tight hold. Gradually and surely her arms loosened. The moment she pulled her arms out, her rib cages felt another wave of pressure. The wind was almost knocked out of her as she yelped, but with gritted teeth she held on to her consciousness and started punching the hand around her.

It did little good. She was staring into the Titan's open mouth. The inside of its mouth was not that different from a human's, except that it was much larger with many more teeth and its breath reeked. The closer she was from the mouth, the hotter its breath seemed to get until it felt like she was in a steam oven.

Her choices led her here. If Ruby were her, she would have chosen the same thing.

Yang closed her eyes. There was no use to struggle anymore; there was no way that she could escape.

And then, she felt the grip around her loosen, and weight suddenly left her for a brief moment before something hard caught up with her and stopped her drop. When she opened her eyes the next moment, she was on the ground, the Titan's severed hand having acted like a cushion under her. The Titan was falling as well, having cast a shadow over her to indicate where it was going to fall. With every bit of her strength she could muster, Yang rolled out of the way, the giant corpse missing her just by a foot.

Mikasa was standing on the corpse's neck, a fresh pair of blades in hand. Blake landed beside Yang, her weapons in hand. Yang glanced around; Armin was on the rooftop, smiling nervously at her.

"What the hell are you guys doing!?" Yang yelled at the girls even though relief flushed through her body.

"Look," Blake smiled and pointed behind Yang. The blonde turned her head and saw the most amazing thing she had seen in her life.

A 50-foot class Titan—one with black shaggy hair and a pair of steel-grey eyes—had just violently ripped off the head of one of the smaller Titans and tossed it into the face of a Titan approaching the group. The macabre projectile travelled above Yang, showering her with bits and pieces of it as it crashed into the other Titan, who predictably fell backwards and knocked down another like two pieces of dominoes. And then, the large Titan proceeded to put the headless beast to the ground, and stomped on its neck a few times with its enormous foot.

Yang gaped at the creature. It appeared much more toned and athletic, with its abdominal muscles clearly showing in a pack of eight. The Titans that she had seen were either lankily or potbellied like the merchant that Ruby almost killed, but none of them were like the one that stood in front of them. Its eyes were set deeply within its sockets, and it possessed an unusual pair of sharpened ears not unlike those that elves in fantasy stories had. Some skin was missing from its face, and it had two rows of jagged teeth with no lips or anything covering it.

It roared, and Yang had to cover her own ears. There was something primal, something exhilarating in the roar: she felt her heart pump and her blood race just from hearing it even behind shielded ears. Exhausted as she was, she was not content to sit down and rest. Her body was compelled to move, and so she did: grabbing onto Blake's waist, she was pulled up along with her teammate when Blake wrapped Gambol shroud on a stubby chimney just as Mikasa grabbed Conny on the collar and dragged him up to the rooftops.

The large Titan seemingly paid no attention to them. Instead, it moved forward at the pace expected of a Titan its size, but Yang could even sense that there was something different about this pace. There was a grim purpose and a murderous intent behind every step it took, unlike the normal Titans who simply wandered and shambled mindlessly, their sole purpose to devour. Instead, this one moved toward the smaller Titans, and prepared itself in a combat stance with its—no, his—fists in front of his face like a boxer.

"Holy…" She breathed. This was what they would call a "Deviant", but its behavior was nothing like the Deviants she had seen. This indicated that the Titan had knowledge of hand-to-hand combat skills, and was intelligent enough to use it. Perhaps the category included more than Titans with simply abnormal behavior?

"Has anybody ever seen a Deviant do that?" Conny was in equal awe.

"I don't know. Is it not common?" Blake asked. She was much more reserved than the rest of the makeshift squad.

"Mostly Deviants are just a little different. They could have superior speed, strength, rudimentary intelligence or hunting tactics. But I've never heard of a Deviant attacking its own kind," Armin answered. Yang could see the gears inside the young man's mind spinning as the giant passed by them: "And it's completely ignoring us. Deviants may be strange, but they are still focused on the extermination of humanity. With the five of us here, there was no reason for it to simply walk past without even looking at us…!"

"It doesn't sound like you know a lot about them…" Yang glanced at Mikasa. The hardened woman was stunned as well, which kind of surprised her: she thought Mikasa would be reserved enough to not care about the appearance of such a strange creature.

"We don't, not really," Conny glanced back at her and blushed a little. "What we know are from accounts of people who were lucky enough to survive Titan attacks and kill them. It really included whatever records we get from each expedition of the Recon Corps, and the information from the… the survivors of the expedition to retake Wall Maria."

"Well, that's… encouraging," Yang chuckled a little, though it was not at all good news to her. Fighting a largely unknown enemy with what appeared to be inadequate equipment was never a good idea. "So, on to more immediate problems. How do we get to the Garrison with two of you out of gas?"

"Actually," Armin turned, his expression even more nervous than before, "I have an idea, but you are not going to like it."

* * *

Ruby's entire body still burned. The pain from the collision was subsiding as she directed her Aura inward to repair whatever damage she took when she was slapped into a wall like an unfortunate honey bee, but the sight of what just happened almost made her stop concentrating on that.

A Titan just burst into the Garrison through the wall and kicked a rather large piece of debris into the face of the Titan that was about to pick her up and eat her. The piece of solid matter was travelling at a fast enough speed that it ripped off the top of its unfortunate recipient's head. The macabre display did not stop there, however; with surprising precision, the large Titan's shin met whatever remained of the smaller Titan's head, and the force of the kick ripped it out from its neck and sent it crashing into the Garrison at a rather intimidating speed. She could feel the building itself shake from the colossal collision, but to her surprise it held.

She was even more shocked when Mikasa descended from the shoulder of the Titan and grabbed her by her belt. Without a moment's pause, the black-haired soldier hoisted her small body like a bundle of firewood. The belt bit into her waist and the pose gave her little comfort; she screamed in pain, barely having time to grab Crescent Rose and hold onto it as much as she could.

The landing was as rough as the trip upwards. Ruby was practically chucked into the building through a broken window. She rolled violently into a stack of tables that was a makeshift barricade, and it took her almost half a minute before she could move even one muscle. The rest of the squad landed moments after, with Weiss being thrown into the room in much the same manner as she was.

"Blake! You mind being gentler next time!?" Weiss coughed and stood up with a limp. Her head and right arm were both bloodied; she did not walk out of that without a scratch, either.

"Ruby, are you okay?" Her sister stood by her side and grabbed onto her hand.

"Yeah, I think…!" Ruby used her support to stand up, though her entire body still hurt from the ordeal. She instinctively glanced at Crescent Rose; it stabbed through a wooden desk and… and through what seemed to be a corpse with its upper skull missing. She immediately recognized that trauma. A large caliber bullet apparently ripped through the head through the mouth cavity; it would have burst out from the top of the skull and brought the content of whatever was inside with it. Death would be instantaneous in this case, but it brought Ruby little comfort: the Titan certainly did not directly cause this death.

Her vision was clearing, and she saw a girl in the trainee's uniform trembling in a heap in front of her. There were splatters of dried blood caked on her cheeks: she had to have been here ever since the person beside her took their own life. The look in her eyes was like that of a terrified rabbit, one that struck a chord in Ruby's heart. Titans were trying to get to her, after all.

"What the fuck are you imbeciles doing in here!?" There was a dull impact of flesh on flesh, a grunt of pain, and whimpers. Jean grabbed one of the cowering recruits by the collar and socked him in the face. They were inside the Garrison when Ruby was thrown into it. Behind him, more than a dozen recruits stood mortified at the chaos. He raised his fist again, only to have Marco hold him back: "Why the fuck did you leave us out to dry!?"

"There… there were Titans in the—in the supply room! T-The Captain ran away a-a-and left us here to rot! T-There was nothing w-w-we could do!" The struck man—a boy, Ruby corrected herself—whined like a kicked puppy.

"Isn't it your fucking job to do something!? Do you fuckers even know how many people died because of you!?" Jean struggled to break free from Marco's hold so that he could pummel the deserter more. It was probably for the best that he did not, Ruby thought with a light sigh; he would have beaten the guy to death.

"Jean, that's enough!" A large burly man with blond hair and golden eyes commanded with almost the same volume as Jean. He was flanked by a short blonde with a bun behind the top of her head and a taller but lankier man with black hair and green eyes. Jean heaved in boiling rage, but his reddened face was slowly and surely returning to its regular pale color.

Ruby stumbled toward the wall and leaned there while she observed the drama, having returned Crescent Rose to its more compact term. She still felt a bit dizzy and her body still hurt, but she wanted to believe that the worst had already come and gone. Yang was helping her on the way, providing her support with her arm. Weiss and Blake were making their way to Ruby as well, both of them looking much worse for wear.

"Ruby, I'm so glad you're all right," Blake smiled gently at her. It was indeed a miracle that both Weiss and she survived the ordeal. By all means, she had accepted what she thought would happen to her, but that strange Titan appeared just in time with her teammates riding on it.

"I owe you that one," she nodded and smiled weakly in response, but her mind was spinning from the circumstances of their survival. The Titan was killing its own kind, and it kept doing it even as they regrouped inside the building. If humanity had their own Titans at their disposal, there was no reason that they could not use them instead of soldiers with delicate Maneuver Gear. This had to mean, then, that the Titan was an unusual one: a Deviant like her first kill, but different.

"That Titan is something else," muttered Weiss. Ruby's eyes met hers, and she was certain that Weiss was thinking about the same thing. The existence of a Titan like that enabled some exciting possibilities; for example, there could be certain numbers of Deviants like it outside the Walls that humanity could potentially exploit. They could use them as assault beasts to spearhead an attack, heavy lifters to seal breaches in the wall, and so much more.

Those were only possibilities, though. It could also be that the Titan was a one-off occurrence and there was nothing like it in the wild. She did not know enough about them to be sure, but she did know their own capabilities: "Yeah, it is, but we can't dwell on it. How's everyone doing in terms of supplies?"

"I've got half a vial of white Dust left," Weiss held Myrtenaster closer to her face and spun its chamber slowly. Her voice was low and reserved, unlike her usual manner of speech: "Not so much a problem yet; I could use others to achieve much the same effect as the white one, but eventually I'm going to run out of all of them if we keep fighting like this."

"Yeah, I know," Ruby sighed. She herself had one magazine of bullets left, and she was willing to bet that neither Blake nor Yang were high on ammo count. Fortunately, it seemed that all the civilians were evacuated so that they could also retreat back to Wall Rose without thinking too much about rescuing anyone else. Unfortunately, they were right in the middle of a pack of Titans.

"The priority has to be to get the recruits gassed up and fighting so that we have a chance," Blake slid out the magazine in Gambol Shroud and checked her ammunition count. "But from what we hear, there're Titans inside the hall where they resupply."

"Yeah, that's a problem," Yang popped out the spent shells in her gauntlet and carefully collected them, "and given how many people here still have gas, it might not be an easy one to solve."

"We found some gear!" One of the recruits hollered as about half a dozen of them came out of a connected room with large wooden crates in their arms. A crowbar smashed and pried open the crates, revealing inside new flintlock muskets and accompanying ammunition. The crates were rather dusty on top, and marked with an emblem of a shield with a horse on it.

"These belong to the Military Police," Armin remarked. The RWBY team walked toward the scene, where most of the recruits including Jean, Mikasa, Conny, Sasha and Armin were gathered. Considering it was a garrison for military personnel, it was not surprising to find equipment such as these.

Ruby picked up one of them and caressed its furniture. It was something that she would only see in museums and photos on books. The craftsmanship on the musket was exquisite to the point that it was more a work of art than a lethal weapon: the barrel was well crafted with some degree of precision, as was the trigger mechanism. There were, surprisingly, engravings in the stock and on the barrel of the weapons, ones that were elaborate enough that Ruby believed would take much time to prepare during the best of times.

"These wouldn't do a lot of good against a Titan," Jean sighed and remarked, holding another in his hand and aiming down the sight before Marco hurriedly pressed on the barrel and made the weapon point to the ground instead.

"No, it would have to be rifled and the projectile be jacketed with a steel core," Ruby responded absent-mindedly while she was examining a lead ball and paper-wrapped portions of black powder. "And this… these things would create so much smoke from the powder pan and the muzzle it'd obscure your vision."

"Rifled?" As Conny popped the question, Ruby put down the musket and unhooked Crescent Rose from her back. Pulling back the charging handle, she allowed the round inside the gun to pop out, before pointing it at the man, who recoiled at the sight of it.

"Yeah. See the spirals in the barrel? These give the bullet spin and make them more accurate at longer ranges," she smiled as the man examined the muzzle in detail. "But these are smoothbore muskets. Like you said, not going to do much good against the Titan."

"But maybe we don't need them to do damage," Armin mused quietly, drawing attention from the crowd to him. The blond boy squirmed visibly from the attention, and he stuttered: "I-I'm just saying, if there's going to be that much smoke, we might as well use it."

"You mean, like a smoke screen?" Weiss stroked her chin in thought. "That could theoretically work, but how are you going to generate that much smoke? We only have about two dozen people in here."

"No, that's not enough," Ruby rubbed her forehead and her temples. The problem was giving her a headache: "And the Titan's got leathery skin that these balls just can't reliably punch through at an angle."

"We can always aim for the eyes," Yang said as she put shell after shell into Ember Celica. "I punched one in the eye and boiled whatever was inside it. That disabled it real good for a while."

"You _punched_ one in the eye…?" The blond man that stood with Annie winced visibly.

"Yeah, I did," Yang smiled at him and flicked her hair. "It felt rather squishy. By the way, the name's Yang."

"Reiner Braun," The man smiled nervously at her. "Must be one hell of a story to tell."

"Does anyone know how many Titans of what size are in the hall?" Armin scratched his head.

"Oi, coward!" Jean snapped at one of the guys in the logistics squad. He grabbed the poor guy by the collar and almost threw him on top of the crates. "What'd you see before you tucked your tail and ran like a little bitch?"

"Uh," he stammered, "There was a huge noise when the gate was broken down and then Titans came in and… there were about six or seven of them, and…"

"The ceiling isn't that high, if I remember right," Reiner said, glancing at the quivering boy. "The Titans can't be more than four meters tall."

"That information is pretty outdated, though. Besides, the guy was so panicked that he may not remember the right thing." Weiss nodded and glanced at both Ruby and Armin, who were deep in thought.

"I'll go scout it out while you guys come up with a plan," Blake turned around to search of an exit.

"I'll go with you," Jean said before grabbing both Conny and Sasha on the collar: "Come with me!"

"Don't tug me by the collar!" Conny protested. "Besides, I'm out of gas!"

"You don't need gas to crawl between the floors!"

Sasha, on the other hand, gagged overly dramatically: "You're choking me!"

"Thanks," Ruby muttered, still examining the crate of muskets as the four exited. "Since we know that the eyes are soft enough, is it common practice to blind them by stabbing them in the eye?"

"Yeah, that's somewhere that our swords can easily stab through without breaking because it's so soft like the human eye," Armin responded, glancing at Ruby. "These musket balls may not be able to punch through Titan skin, but they'd probably work well against the eyes."

"They're not terribly accurate at ranges more than 100 meters, and they lose a lot of their power at ranges beyond that, so we have to plan the initial volley carefully. How are we going to get into the supply hall?"

"There's an elevator with a basket that can be lowered into it. Since we know that Titans are attracted to the gathering of people, and…" Armin noticed Ruby staring at him with a grin, and his eyes widened with recognition and surprise: "You're not seriously thinking about…"

"I know it's kind of insane, but it's the only shot we're going to have if we want to all get out of this place," she responded, glancing at the elevator and the guns in succession. "The elevator, the guns, the Titans, and the things we have. They add up."

"Y-Yeah, but… my god," Armin sighed in resignation and clutched his head. "There're so many risks in this plan that I don't even want to think about the odds of success…"

"It's the best chance we've got," Ruby patted him on the shoulder with a reassuring smile.

"What are you two talking about?" Reiner looked at the pair, confused. "You mind letting us know?"

"Well, we were thinking that if you can load people up with muskets in the basket, it'll serve as a very nice bait for the Titans to gather around." Ruby watched as the recruits' eyes widen and jaws slacken. "Then, when they get into point-blank range, they shoot the Titans right in the eyes."

"Meanwhile, our best Titan killers hide in the support beam, and kill them while they're blinded." Armin finished the thought, to the utter astonishment that the rest of the recruits had.

"… Have I ever told you that you're insane?" Weiss had much the same expression, but she was the first one who understood the implications of the plan. Ruby was about to explain, but she held up her hand: "Nuh-uh-uh, just don't. I don't want to know how many stars have to line up for this thing to work."

"Yeah, but you have to admit, this plan actually has a chance of working," Yang leaned forward and smiled at Armin, who blushed brightly in response. "I mean, this is a plan that doesn't require the use of gas so everyone should be able to participate. Besides, if it doesn't work, we're screwed anyway."

"But this puts a lot of pressure on the Titan killers though," Armin buried his face in his palms, "If one of them screws up, then we will end up all dead… I feel really bad about it, putting so much on the line of so few…"

"We won't screw up," Mikasa laid a hand on Armin's shoulder. The boy looked up, and he saw a small but surely radiant smile on her otherwise stony face.

"Well, let's load up the muskets and wait for the scouts to come back," Reiner glanced around with a wide, hearty smile, "and let's do this!"


	5. Chapter 5

Author's Notes:

1. If you're bothered by grammar and spelling mistakes, you can help by becoming a beta reader! I can't catch everything by myself, after all.

2. On the topic of shipping. This story isn't written with specific ships in mind. There will be no official recognition of ships unless I write it in.

3. The story branches from here. I can finally bring in elements of the RWBY universe in larger quantities. Also, expect less action and more exposition for the following few chapters; things need to be developed before the Recon Corp's expedition. Also, if you're bothered by the repeats, it's not going to happen too much any more now that the story has opened up.

4. This author makes no guarantee that everyone is going to live through the events to the end. This includes RWBY, JNPR, and other characters mentioned in this story.

* * *

Ruby gave a quiet breath as she hid silently on a horizontal support beam on the ceiling of the supply hall. Like Blake and the scouting team reported, there were seven 10-foot class Titans roaming the giant deserted room. They showed no interest in the bottles and canisters of compressed gas lining the walls, or the storage lockers for disposable blades around the pillars, and it did not seem that they had taken notice of the hidden assassins.

Ruby and Blake were chosen for this operation. Weiss needed to conserve her Dust supply for further aerial maneuvers and Yang's weapon was not effective enough against Titans. The other five were Mikasa, Conny, Annie, Reiner, and Jean. Those were all among the best of the best within the graduating class of recruits, and the plan gave no tolerance for failure.

The rest of the recruits loaded up their muskets. They were brand-new flintlocks with dry powder and good quality balls. If aimed and used correctly, Ruby had no doubt that they would cause a lot of damage. Despite that, there were actually many more questions that came into her mind when she had some time to actually think about it.

First of all, the Maneuver Gear was obviously of incredibly high quality and fine craftsmanship. The steel wires were strong enough to support the weight of two people, and it was capable of firing anchors deep enough into rocks and bricks to give it the traction it needed to suspend them in the air. She saw all that during their initial encounter with the Colossal Titan. They would also have pumps to compress gas, pressure valves to understand by how much the gas was compressed, and sturdy enough metal cylinders to contain high-pressure gas. Making available all of that to be used in warfare would normally mandate a rather advanced industrial base; at least, they would have had some good metal-working facilities and invented the steam engine in order to drive the pump.

If that was the case, why have they not discovered rifling and self-contained cartridges? It was only natural that someone would have found out about the effect of adding angular momentum on a fast-travelling projectile like a bullet. Their tooling would have completely been capable of carving rifling into the barrel of the muskets, and even if they did not have the capacity to make large amounts of cartridges for small arms, they could at least make shells for the cannons. From what she observed, the Titans were not so durable that a cannon shell to the neck or upper chest would not kill. It would even be easier if the shells were filled with explosives with timed fuses so that they would blow up a split second after they penetrate the skin, causing all manners of havoc inside the Titan's body and make the destruction of their weak spot all but a virtual certainty.

The problem was, why did nobody think of that? Was it because not enough people in this world were educated due to the need for them to work to survive? Was it because a lot of knowledge had been lost during and after the fall of Wall Maria?

Ruby shook her head. The most pressing concern—other than taking the lives of the seven Titans below her—was to find out whether or not Dust existed in this world. If they had Dust, not only would Team RWBY be able to replenish the supply they used during the battle they just fought, but they could also revolutionize the entire society and perhaps give an edge to humans in their struggle against the Titans. But even if the world did not have Dust, she was certain that she could make a ton of difference. After all, she did build Crescent Rose herself; applying what she knew to this world to give the humans better weapons could not be that hard.

Coming out of her thoughts, she glanced around the others hiding around the hole in the middle of the ceiling. The musket team would be lowered through it until they were at eye-level of the Titans. Their volley of fire would be the signal for the seven of them to descend and terminate their assigned targets.

She could barely make out Blake's silhouette opposite to her. The girl moved like a cat and hid like one, too; she was crouched on the beam much like Ruby was. Her eyes almost reflected light in the darkness. Ruby could also hear breathing from the five recruits around her. The silence would be vomit-inducing if the Titan's footsteps did not break it up once in a while. It did not seem that these thing had sharp noses. A dog or any other creature with sharp olfactory senses would have smelled the blood, sweat and grime on them. As long as nobody did anything stupid, they would be hidden just fine.

The hand-spun winch creaked painfully as the basket started to slowly descend. About fifteen people were standing in the basket in two files and oversaw each of the four sides, Armin and Marco among them. Each of them had a loaded musket in hand. They had all had training on how to use a firearm as part of their courses as a recruit, but this would probably be the first time that they were shooting at targets that would fight back. Each of them had a grave look on their face: if one of the seven would fail, they were the perfect bundled meal for a Titan.

Ruby held her breath. The plan was in motion. There was no room for error and less room for doubt. It was do or die; she was certain that everybody knew that.

Armin gestured the people that controlled the winch. The basket stopped at roughly the Titan's eye level. One by one, they took notice of the bait being given to them, and being the dumb predator they were, they turned around and started shambling toward them.

"Hold your fire… hold your fire…" Ruby heard Armin whisper. The boy's voice was quivering a little; she could see his hands tremble as he braced the musket's stock against his frail shoulder. There had to be extra pressure on him, she thought; he was the one that proposed the plan along with her.

She felt her own hands lose warmth. If Crescent Rose could absorb moisture, it would have been soaked by then, because her own undergarments and even her blouse was sticking to her skin. In fact, she could not even tell if it was the remaining rain water or her own sweat that was causing the fabric to stick. Biting down her lips, she tried calming her own heart with a few deep breaths, smiling bitterly at the thought. This was no time to think about how much pressure Armin was under considering that she too proposed the plan.

"Take aim," Armin breathed. The recruits moved almost in unison, shouldering their weapons and aiming down the sights. Some of them still quivered like Armin did; one was almost crying as sticky snot flowed out of his nose, but none of them backed down.

The Titans moved still, oblivious to the danger the boom-sticks posed. It was nerve-wracking for Ruby to watch their advance. Sixty feet, fifty feet, forty feet; with each step, these man-eating monsters approached the basket of helpless humans, no doubt thinking that they were in luck if they were capable of thinking at all.

"Wait for my signal…" Armin's own voice was on the verge of breaking down. Ruby could not imagine the mental capacity any of the recruits in the basket had to have when staring down at these monsters as they approached. Her own grip around Crescent Rose tightened; she would not want to slip and lose her grip because of how sweaty her hands were when it was time—

"FIRE!" Armin's scream was drowned out by a volley of musket fire. The sound was not a unison but a burst of loud noises as smoke billowed from the flash pan and the muzzle of the weapons, but each one of them fired without fail. Most shots landed in the eyes of the Titan, with only a few missing; that was because Armin waited until they were just within twenty feet of the basket before giving out the order.

The sound of gunfire hit Ruby like a bolt of lightning. Her mind was devoid of thought as she slipped off of the support beam, firing a couple of rounds behind her in the process to arc toward her target. The recoil sent her lurching forward along with gravity and she found herself quickly approaching the neck of her target. It was clutching its hands in its face in pain, and the neck was in plain view.

Crescent Rose's edge bit into the flesh with little difficulty. Ruby swung around like she had done so many times before, and made cuts deep enough to almost reach the bone: once the blade carve through the thick, leathery skin, the underlying flesh felt quite similar to that of an Ursa. Using another round, Ruby imposed more momentum on her scythe, spinning twice around the neck of her target. Two pieces of flesh separated from its body. In the front, its windpipe was sliced open; the wound let out a rather large burst of reeking steam as the Titan exhaled one last time, but it was not the fatal one. The piece of flesh at the back separated and rolled down the back as the abomination fell. By that time, Ruby was already on the ground.

She stood up and glanced around. The five recruits all anchored their Gear into the back of their targets and with similar ferocity sliced open the back of the necks. It had to be a maneuver that they were trained for, Ruby thought, because their movements were rather uniform: anchor their gear, brace themselves, then leverage their waist and arms to cut through the thick skin and reach the tender part of the Titan's flesh. The cuts were deep and bloody; steamy liquid burst out of vessels that they severed, but before it could stain anybody, the recruits were gone.

"Too shallow!" Blake's bark snapped Ruby's attention to her. Her partner never had anything to anchor herself on the Titan, so she never had the benefit of firm footing. Her target turned its head, but she was already running down its back and leaping from it, trying her best to put some distance between her and the monster.

"WIND UP!" Armin screamed over the crashing thuds of dead Titans. The winch creaked and groaned as the basket started moving upwards, but it was painfully slow even when compared to how fast the Titans could move.

Ruby snarled at the report. The outcome was not unexpected; indeed, she had braced for the result that everyone would die, but it was too early to give up just yet. Driving her Semblance to the max, she seemingly vanished into thin air with a shower of rose petals. The next moment, she appeared at the Titan's foot. It was searching for Blake, who was then dangling on a support beam, having secured Gambol Shroud onto it the moment her cut failed.

Ruby angled her scythe and charged forward, using a bullet to further accelerate toward the Titan's ankle. Crescent Rose bit into it and found the soft cartilage of the joint. At the speed Ruby was travelling, the blade carved through the cartilage like a hot knife through butter: the Titan stumbled and fell forward, its foot having been severed from its leg. Annie took the opportunity to leap on top of the Titan's neck and sliced it open, this time deep enough to ensure that it never moved again.

The basket slowly lowered to the ground; both Yang and Weiss leaped from the hole and landed, as well. The Garrison was then clear of enemies on the inside.

"Well, that was a thing," Yang smiled and patted Ruby on the shoulder, but the smaller girl almost crumbled under her touch: "Ruby, you okay?"

"Y-yeah…" she breathed while groaning a little. The tension of the moment bled away in a hurry; now that she had time to think about it, she and her team had been under pressure ever since they got here: "Just… let me lie down for a bit…"

"Okay," Yang propped up her sister by wrapping her arm around the neck and limped toward a long bench. Exhaustion was getting to the team. The past few hours had been more taxing than any fight they got into before coming to this strange world. She instead sat down and leaned against a row of metal lockers, examining Ember Celica for any damage her gauntlets took.

"Come on! Move it! Gas up!" Ruby lifted her heavy eyelids to see Jean giving orders to the recruits. The hissing of gas and clanking of cylinders drummed up a cacophony that almost served as the perfect lullaby until Armin approached her.

"Are you okay?" The blond boy asked with a smile.

"Yeah, I'm fine… I just need to get some shut-eye; it's been a pretty long day," Ruby responded drowsily. "Besides, don't you have to gas up and resupply?"

"I've already done that," Armin sighed and sat beside her. He was looking away from her, and his body was rather tense: "Uh, um…"

"That was one hell of a thing we pulled off," she turned to lie on her back, folding her hands under her head as a pillow. "You're quite something when you're figuring out a plan, aren't you?"

"There was… um… a moment when the last Titan was not dead that… uh… I thought I failed everyone…"

"You didn't fail anybody. It's not like all of those other blockheads are going to think of anything better."

"Yeah, but… I just want to, you know, thank you… and your team…"

"What for?"

"For saving me and… and going along with what we're doing… I know this isn't your fight and…"

"Well, it's our fight now," Yang let out a grunt and stood up before walking to Ruby's bench and sitting down on the other end, "we're going to need to rely on you if we want to go home; it's only fair that we help you fight whatever it is that's coming to destroy yours."

"Still, if it weren't for you, I… I wouldn't be standing here today," Armin's face glowed bright red.

"Neither would I," Conny gave Armin a heavy pat on the back, enough that the boy almost stumbled off of his seat. "Thanks a lot, all of you."

"It was no trouble," Yang smiled and patted Conny on the head. The boy did not resist, but like Armin he blushed heavily before grumbling a few rather incomprehensible words. Ruby turned again, this time using her forearm as a pillow.

"What's on your mind?" She was staring directly at Blake, who was sitting in the corner with her hands folded around her knees. She was obviously worried about something, Ruby decided.

"The Titan outside," Blake's words caught the attention of everyone around: "I wonder what it is, how it came around, and where we can find more of its kind."

"It's probably just a Deviant," Conny dismissed.

"That's no reason to dismiss something," Weiss sat up after putting away her Dust vials and stretched her limbs. "If we can find more Titans like it, maybe we can herd them like a bunch of angry animals and have them clear out the space between the walls. That way, you guys won't need our help to survive."

"It is an enticing prospect," Armin stroked his chin in thought, "but we know very little about them. We don't even know there're creatures like it out there."

Ruby rolled around and sat up with a grunt. Her brain had been spinning; the fatigue of combat was expelled all of a sudden and she felt energized by the train of thought: "Let's go. Maybe we can walk it to the gates and have it help the defense."

"Hey, where are you guys going!?" There was Jean, yelling at the group as they made their way into the courtyard and onto the ceiling of the Garrison. From there, they had a great view of their surroundings, including the large Deviant who fought their own kind.

"What the hell?" Conny exclaimed. Ruby herself was amazed at what she saw. The Deviant Titan was sprawled over a ruined building, its arms and legs held by bigger Titans who were attracted to the Garrison after the group made their way into it. And there were smaller Titans gathered around the Deviant, as well; they were slowly but surely consuming it.

"C-Cannibalism? From Titans?" Armin stuttered. Even though she had seen plenty of blood and gore in the past couple of hours, Ruby's stomach still churned from the scene. The Deviant was regenerating, certainly, but it was not enough to replenish what the others ate.

"We should help it," Blake drew Gambol Shroud and sized up the situation. "If we can get rid of the larger ones, we could save it."

"What for?" Jean and the rest of the recruits also made their way to the rooftop. "A Titan will always be a Titan. There's no telling it wouldn't try to eat us like dessert after a meal once all the Titans are dealt with."

"But think of the things we can learn from it!" Reiner was more excited than Jean was about this. His enthusiasm seemed to radiate and infect others including Annie as they nodded in agreement.

"He's right," Ruby muttered, having drawn Crescent Rose and extended it in her hand, "we know next to nothing about these creatures. The possibility of having others like it out there is too enticing to ignore. We have to investigate and find out more."

"You're all insane," Jean drawled a long sigh.

"What isn't?" With this response, Blake leaped from the roof to the ground. At the same time, both Mikasa and Ruby dashed forward toward the giant in trouble. And, at that exact moment, the Deviant Titan started to struggle. Perhaps it saw the girls making their way toward it, and was saving its energy for a final push to free itself.

The smaller Titans were easily dispatched. Ruby and Blake worked together to behead them, carving chunks of flesh from their necks. The larger ones were too busy holding down the Deviant as it struggled to notice Mikasa coming in from above; she killed one of them with ease, and was in the process of moving in to kill the other when the Deviant suddenly made its move. It kicked away the one small Titan that remained stuck to its leg, and then smashed its head into the remaining large Titan's. As the remaining Titan recoiled from the brief concussion, the Deviant used its forearm to bash it on the face before using its gigantic lipless jaw into the large Titan's neck, ripping a huge chunk out of it.

"It knows exactly where to bite," Armin drew in a sharp breath. "It's not just a Deviant. Someone taught it how best to kill Titans."

The last Titan fell with a loud thud. The smaller one was kicked off of its balance and Blake took the opportunity to slice open its neck. With that last burst of vitality, the Deviant Titan was finally spent. It attempted to remain standing, but instead it wobbled and fell on its face with a crash.

"I thought Titans would regenerate and keep moving," Weiss observed with her arms folded in front of her chest, "but it almost look like that one was exhausted."

"Yeah, you're right," Conny muttered, "it looked like how Ruby was when she collapsed."

"And the smoke, too. Is that normal?" Weiss continued, gesturing with her head at the fallen Titan: "I thought only dead Titans smoke, but nobody even touched its neck."

The smoke and steam wafted but it was then clearing quickly as the flesh on the Titan's back dissolved and disappeared. Armin held his breath and muttered at the sight: "…Oh, my god…"

"Is that…?"

"Holy shit…"

There was a humanoid shape sitting partially joined with the nape of the Titan's neck. It was wearing the same grey tunic and the straps for the Maneuver Gear, though the Gear itself was no longer visible and the tunic was missing a sleeve. The shape had the lanky build and the tanned skin of a boy. It had jet black hair and a round face.

"Eren…" Mikasa could not believe her eyes as she breathed. The next moment, her blades dropped onto the ground as she dashed in, her arms already wrapped around the small boy's shoulder. And she was sobbing into his chest.

Ruby was frozen at the sight. Was Eren the Titan? What did that mean? Did he turn into the Titan or did he hijack a Titan after he was eaten? How did he still retain his skills and knowledge inside a Titan's body?

What the hell was going on?

* * *

Commander Dot Pixis examined the four young ladies in front of him. They were dressed in outlandish costumes as if they were attending some kind of festival; it was rather hard for him to believe that these girls were effective enough in the field to rival trained soldiers of the Garrison. The fact that they braved a Titan attack and survived was certainly a testament of their skills on the battlefield, but some of the claims in the reports—one such claim stating that they could make leaps in mid-air—were stretching his imagination a little too far for his comfort.

He unscrewed his flask and took a sip, letting the oak-aged liquid burn a path down his throat and light the fire in his stomach. His daughter, had he had one, would probably be the same age as these young ladies and his recruits. He resented the idea of sending children to throw their lives away against the Titans, but there were few choices open to him. Casualty reports for the Garrison forces were staggering. He had lost a few companies' worth of men and women to buy time for the evacuation and, although it succeeded, he was not certain that he could still maintain defense of Wall Rose.

Screwing his flask back on, he stopped pacing back and forth in front of the girls. Laying his eyes on the one with short black hair, he squeezed a smile and raised the roll of paper in his hand: "So, I take it that you are the unexpected visitors in these reports."

"Yes." The girl's answer was rather timid. He liked that; women should be reserved and gentle.

"You know, if I were to die, it wouldn't be bad if one of you would kill me." He swept his gaze across the line. Their sizes were certainly different, as were their eyes. Some shone with brilliant confidence, others with shrewd reservation. That was good, he thought; they had not had time to take in what just happened to let the mental trauma set in yet. He would not want them to be debilitated so quickly.

"Sir, we are here to—"

"Dust, Aura, and Semblance," the Commander grunted, interrupting the girl—Ruby, was it? "These are outlandish terms and notations that I don't really understand. But then again, I never understood women as a whole, so I guess I shouldn't blame you for coming up with something so absurd."

"With all due respect, sir, it's no more absurd than bipedal creatures the height of a tower eating humans."

"Settle down, girl; I'm not done yet." The white-haired princess had a rather fiery temper, Pixis thought; perhaps she was a redhead before her hair turned white for some reason. Stress, maybe? "You are saying that all that you achieved on the battlefield was because you know how to apply Dust. Your durability and strength came from your Aura, and your Semblance provided you with other impressive features?"

"Yes, sir." The blonde girl squirmed a little bit when he chose to stare at her bountiful bosom.

The Commander chuckled throatily before he once again unscrewed his flask and took a sip: "And, if I'm understanding you correctly, you wish to know if such a substance exists in our world?"

"Our understanding is that there is no prior knowledge of Dust," the girl with a black bowtie sitting on her head said.

"Then what are you asking me for?"

"We ask your support in seeking out this information. In return, we will assist with whatever operation you may consider," she said, drawing a small elbow from the white princess standing beside her.

"Perhaps you should consult with your comrades on the assistance part," that did not escape the Commander's eyes as he put away his flask, "but I am indeed interested. What is this Dust thing?"

"It's a solidified form of energy," Ruby answered quickly with a shy smile. "We use it to power our weapons and abilities. Normally in crystalline form it's not that dangerous, but in powder form it could be sensitive to shock and flames. It is also more potent if it's in powder form."

"Like gunpowder?"

"Somewhat, but much more versatile. They are, as far as I know, mined instead of manufactured—"

"They are mined mostly in their powder form, but they could occur naturally as crystals," Weiss interrupted, "and then they're graded. High-purity Dust crystals remain in their crystalline form, and lower purity Dust are ground into powder form and sold. The grinding, incidentally, increase their volatility."

The Commander hummed and stroked his moustache: "Interesting. What makes you think that there may be such things in this world?"

"We have no reason to believe there aren't," said Blake, "but we have no evidence to support their existence either."

"So, you're asking me to devote resources to your search when the chance of success was as good as flipping a fair coin?" The Commander leered at the women, who seemed to sweat and recoil from his eyes: "I would like my cards stacked in my favor before I make any move."

"Sir, we're asking you for some horses and the directions to some mines so that we—"

Yang objected sternly, but Pixis held up a hand and stopped her sentence in the middle. Then, he walked toward Ruby and gestured before they exited the small tent: "you, come with me. The rest of you can wait here. Anka, give them some bread and water; they look famished."

Pixis noticed that the young lady was trailing a consistent three feet behind him, her hands fidgeting. They were in the inner cloistered courtyard of the Garrison building on the other side of Wall Rose around the Gate. His soldiers noticed him and stopped to salute, but he simply waved his flask to allow them to continue without showing him the respect protocol dictated. They were in a time of crisis, there was no doubt; he could not afford to let his men waste precious seconds to observe such frivolous matters.

"Come closer," he gestured, and Ruby moved up to beside him. He towered over the little girl even in his wizened age; it made him feel like he was a father taking a friendly stroll with his daughter: "You weren't exactly feeling comfortable in that tent. Was it because it was warm?"

"No, sir," Ruby answered. Her voice was almost lost in the commotion of people.

Pixis chuckled and took another swig: "Let's go somewhere a bit more private. Can you get up to the top of the wall without help?"

"No, sir."

"Well, it is a little too tall for you." They were then at the bottom of the wall. Pixis sized up the giant structure with half-open eyes and scoffed with a smile: "If you don't mind the old-man smell, hang on to my shoulders."

Ruby did so, and Pixis flew up almost to her surprise. Launching the wires with rehearsed fluidity, he dashed on the wall even with Ruby on his back. Within half a minute, they were at the top, and Ruby slid off of his back: "Whoa."

"Heh, I still got it. Much faster than taking the stairs, eh?" the old man patted his hands and took yet another sip from his flask. Ruby nodded to his satisfaction: "Now, you seem like an honest girl. What do you think of this war we're fighting? The war against the Titans? Don't worry, talk to me like you would talk to your dad or your friend; nobody else's listening."

There was a moment of hesitation before Ruby spoke: "this isn't sustainable. You're throwing your numbers against them and you don't even have a reliable measure of defense. The attrition can't last. At this rate, it is only a matter of time before you're annihilated."

"Everyone knows this, I'm sure," the Commander nodded. For someone who purportedly only came to this world a few hours ago, she sure produced an assessment accurate enough to impress him. "What you're offering is a possibility to tilt the scales."

"It's only a possibility, and I-I don't really know if it would actually tilt the scales now that I've seen what we're up against."

"Good. I would scold you if you said anything other than the truth."

"But sir, we need your support. We just got to this world, and we witnessed…" Ruby paused for a moment.

"Want a drink?" The Commander offered her his flask. Ruby looked at it for a moment before shaking her head. He chuckled: "It helps quite a bit with that."

"No, sir, I… I need to remember those who died because I couldn't help," she rubbed her own face before taking in a deep breath. "Without Dust, we're as good as civilians. At least let us go and search for it."

"And if you come back with nothing?"

"I can still help. I built Crescent Rose myself. I'm sure my knowledge and skills can apply somewhere. I already know how to improve your cannons and muskets so that you can inflict more damage on the Titans. If the conditions allow for it, then these two things could be used to much greater effect on them than they are being used now."

The Commander arched an eyebrow. He turned and stared Ruby in the eyes for a good ten seconds before smiling and squeezing his eyes shut: "Very well; you'll have your horses. In addition, I'll attach Anka to your team. She'll direct you to the places you need to go—"

A rather loud explosion interrupted his sentence. "That sounded like cannon fire," Ruby commented, but there was no need; the Commander turned immediately toward the source of the sound. It seemed like one of the emplaced cannons fired at something around the root of the wall at the river. There was a billowing pillar of smoke rising from there.

"Sir!" Within five seconds, a messenger came to Pixis' side.

"What's going on? Who fired that cannon?" The Commander's voice grew a lot sterner.

"Sir! Captain Verman had captured what was reported to be a boy who can somehow shapeshift into a Titan! Squad Leader Dietrich requested me to send for you, sir!" The man panted.

"That damned candy-ass," the Commander breathed disdain. Kitts Verman was not the best soldier on the field. Although he was fit and his skills with the Gear was quite good, he was a weakling at heart who could not stay cool under pressure. As long as he stayed well behind enemy lines, he could execute orders well enough for the Commander to hand him logistical work, but he would panic and abandon his post at the first sign of danger. He did hear that Verman abandoned his post when the Garrison was under attack.

"Eren," Ruby breathed.

"You know him?"

"Yes, sir. Without him helping us retake the Garrison, we and about twenty recruits wouldn't have made it out alive," Ruby answered. She was looking directly at the Commander with a determination he had never seen before.

"Can you vouch for him?"

"…No, sir, I cannot," the girl stammered after a short break of silence, but immediately the steely resolve returned: "but I know what I saw. I would very much like him to remain alive at least for now."

"You know the risk he would pose if he turned out to be hostile, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Very well. You, get to the medical tent and let both Anka and Gustav know that I'm headed there," the Commander took a last swig from his flask and took up the handles on his Maneuver Gear. Ruby's eyes showed him everything he needed to know: "Ruby, come with me."

"Sir, I can move faster on my own," she said, unhooking her weapon and extending it into a giant scythe, "and this time around, I'm working with gravity instead of against it."

The Commander chuckled. The moment he nodded, Ruby disappeared in a small shower of rose petals. Letting out a long breath, he too started to move toward the location of the blast.

Perhaps he did miss out on not having children.

* * *

Armin coughed after a full breath of singeing hot air. He certainly did hear the canon fire. He was rather certain that the shot would have landed in their general direction too. Those were anti-Titan cannons, so they would have been ripped to pieces by now. But they were not. His arms and legs were still attached to him. He was still breathing—however painful it was. He was still alive, and so was Mikasa. But Eren was nowhere to be found. And the cannon ball…

It took a few seconds for the smoke and steam to clear around him to see well enough. Giant bones surrounded them like a rib cage—no, it was an actual rib cage, Armin corrected himself. The characteristic smell of charred flesh soon entered his nostrils as he glanced around further. Behind them there was a wall of sinewy flesh with a half-formed spinal column in the middle. Around them, meat and skin were trying to grow, but they stopped in the middle as if something stripped them away. The rib cage encircled a cavernous space: both Mikasa and he fit inside it comfortably enough that they could stand up. Given what Eren could do, Armin could see this was the very least that he could accomplish, but: "Where's Eren?"

"Hey, you all right!? We have to get out of here! This thing's going to collapse like a Titan corpse soon!" There was the familiar voice penetrating the thick veil of smoke and steam. Eren emerged from beyond that, swinging into the space and landing beside the two.

"Yeah, we're fine," Armin answered. The fact that Eren was not beside them when he should have been would suggest that the skeleton was his doing. "The soldiers aren't attacking because they aren't sure what to make of this, but they'll eventually fire again!"

"Yeah, I doubt they'll just listen to what I have to say after what they just saw. I just remembered something, though!" Eren agreed for a moment before speaking even more emphatically than before: "The basement back home in Shiganshina! My old man told me everything would make sense once I go there! Whatever I am right now, he's got his hands in it! Damn it! If he knew something like that, why would he keep it hidden!? And while we're thinking about it, where the hell did he vanish to five years ago? Where the fuck is he after all these years?!"

"Eren, we've got more important things to think about right now!" Mikasa cautioned in the middle of Eren's rant, but Armin's mind was working quickly. The situation was rapidly spiraling out of control. Captain Verman was certainly losing his mind after he ordered the cannon to fire on them, but he was only acting according to what he knew: that the Titans were dangerous enemies that had to be dispatched, and that Eren could somehow shift into a Titan. The latter fact was confirmed just mere seconds ago. As far as the Captain was concerned, they—Armin and Mikasa included—were traitors that had to die. There were only a couple of ways that they could get out of this mess alive, and Eren was discussing the escape route with Mikasa.

Armin spared a glance at his good friend, and immediately he understood how it was impossible: "Eren, you look horrible! Your nose's also bleeding! You can't transform again!"

"Look, there's no way we can get away from them without using my Titan powers, so whether or not I can transform really doesn't matter. Now, if you two quit protecting me, you might get to live and I can make my escape much more easily. Then I'll go to the basement in Shiganshina and grab the research and stuff and then come back with it."

"I'm going with you," Mikasa was adamant, "if I slow you down, just leave me behind."

"The hell you are! I'm not like the scrawny defenseless kid anymore!"

"I don't take orders from you."

The plan Armin was formulating in his mind was taking shape even as Mikasa and Eren argued. The Titan remnant was crumbling behind and in front of them, evaporating and disappearing like a regular Titan corpse. The smoke and steam obscuring their figures worked much to their advantage, as the soldiers had to walk into it to attack them, which they did not seem to do just yet. The cannon took a long time to reload; he estimated 20 more seconds at best. The area was pre-sighted for the cannon, so they could fire without line-of-sight. Eren's physical condition would not allow him to shift into Titan form once again to stop the shell. His plan to escape alone seemed also doomed to fail because of that. And, for all his fears, Armin could not abandon the man who saved his life just a few hours ago. The moment the cannon was reloaded would be the moment the Captain would order it to fire again, unless he could convince him not to.

But would he even succeed? Just a few hours ago, his will to fight buckled and broke when he saw the Titan. There was no way that he could pull it off. He had always been a baggage to the two. Mikasa was the one that had the skills and strength, and Eren was the one that had unwavering courage and determination. He, on the other hand, had always cowered in the corner from the time he was bullied on the streets of Shiganshina to a few hours ago when Eren shoved him out of the Titan's mouth. He was the one that was being protected. He was the weak link. He was the sheltered.

Armin gritted his teeth. He was almost scared out of his wits. What if he failed? What if that was not enough? What if, despite all his efforts, everything would fall apart? The plan he had was way too crazy. It was just like the plan he drafted up at the Garrison. The consequence of failure was the most severe. He could not possibly think that he could solve everything!

"Armin. Armin!" Eren shook him, and he snapped out of his thoughts. "Armin! Got any ideas?"

"It's not like all those other blockheads are going to think of anything better" was what Ruby said about his plan. There was not enough time to think up another plan, and this one—even though it seemed absolutely insane—was the only thing that had a remote chance of success: "…Yeah, I have one, but you're not going to like it. It involves someone going out there and convincing them that they need you and your knowledge about the Titans. It's a long shot, so I'm not even remotely certain that it's going to work, so it's probably best that we don't go with it—"

"No, Armin, I trust you." Eren interrupted him. He snapped his head up and found Eren smiling at him. "You've made plenty of good calls before. If you hadn't called for Hannes back when we were running from Shiganshina, we'd all be Titan food right now."

"And the plan at the Garrison was brilliant," Mikasa joined in. She even smiled at him; that smile alone caused Armin's heart to race even faster.

"But… but are you sure you want to put your lives in my hands? For a plan that doesn't even have that much of a chance to succeed?" Armin stammered.

Both his friends nodded at the same time without a moment's hesitation.

"For this to work, you two can't look threatening at all. Put down your swords and gear, and appear as defenseless as you can," he whispered. The cannon was about to finish reloading. The firing order would be issued at any moment. If he needed to act, it was that exact moment. Taking a deep breath, he tried to smooth out his thumping heart before standing up and walking out of the wall of smoke.

"STOP RIGHT THERE, SCUM!" The Captain bellowed.

"He isn't our enemy, sir!" Armin stopped and stood at attention, mustering all the voice he could get from his bowels to bellow at the same volume. "We are willing to relinquish all information we've got about the Titans!"

"Shut up! You showed your true colors and you're still trying to beg for your life!? If you're trying to say that he's not a Titan, then show me proof!"

"THERE'S NO NEED FOR PROOF!" Armin shouted over the Captain. "It's never about what he is! It's about what he can and will do!"

"What the hell are you talking about!?"

"Those that had seen him must have also seen him fighting the other Titans! That he was surrounded by them but still killed more and more of them! And the Titans were trying to kill him, too! That means the Titans see him like they see us, as food! And he sees the Titans as we see them, as enemies!"

"The boy's got a point…"

"He might just be on our side…"

Murmurs came from the group of soldiers around them. Armin's heart leaped: he never thought he could have this effect on them. His plan worked! He was sure of it—

"CANNON READY!" The Captain raised his hand, to Armin's surprise. Then, he continued: "We'll never understand how the Titans work! You can't fool me with your trickery! Blast these bastards to kingdom come!"

No! He was so scared of us that he could not see reason!

No! This couldn't be happening!

No!

Armin's legs trembled. He glanced back at Mikasa and Eren. His plan failed. They would all die there, being killed by humans! Fate was a whimsical mistress indeed!

Then, there were rose petals falling above them. The next second, a sharp metal clang rang from where the cannon was, and Armin instinctively found the source of the sound. A short girl with red cape stood on top of the cannon's barrel, her giant scythe lodged firmly into the cannon itself.

Ruby? What the heck was she doing there?

"What!? Who are you!?" The Captain screamed at her.

"Someone who sees reason," Ruby said, her hand gripping Crescent Rose firmly. "You're trying to kill our only good source of information on the Titans, and at the same time murder two other innocent humans? Come on!"

"Seriously, that is pretty stupid." There was another voice, and Armin snapped his neck to his right. Weiss landed quietly beside him, her rapier drawn. "Besides, he's going to be a great asset to us. But, for someone as cowardly as you are, you probably don't really care about who lives or who dies on the front lines."

"Shut up! Who the hell are you people? What do you know about me!?" The Captain was indignant.

"Enough to know that you ran away at the first sign of danger," a third voice—Armin recognized that to be Blake's, who was then standing behind the Captain—joined the chorus. "Captain Verman, you're not exactly the bravest man on the field. Would you mind telling us what happened in the Garrison while the recruits—including Eren, Mikasa and Armin—fought and died in the district with us?"

"I-I was needed elsewhere! I—" He stammered, but then his authority seemed to return to him: "Who the hell are you people!? I will have you all executed for insubordination!"

"Sorry, bud, but we don't exactly answer to you," Yang was standing to Armin's left. She wrapped her arm around Armin's neck and pulled the diminutive boy in closer. Then, she pointed behind her with her thumb: "For now, we answer to that guy."

"Seize them! Get them! They're traitors to humanity!" The Captain screamed, but nobody moved.

Commander Dot Pixis walked out from the smoke with a stern look on his face: "Would you stop it, Verman? I'm embarrassed for your indignation."

"C-C-C-Commander, sir!" All of the soldiers suddenly snapped to attention. "But these are dangerous criminals! They pose a grave threat to—"

"Shut up for a second. Secure him and bring him to the command tent. Gustav, you're taking over for the moment; assemble and account for the forces we have and the supplies we possess, then have my staff produce a report for the Supreme Commander and the King," the Commander chuckled and walked toward the Captain, whose face turned ash white as two soldiers grabbed him by the arms and yanked him away.

"Anka, go with these fine young ladies; you know what to do. And…" The Commander turned around and smiled shrewdly at Armin: "I think what you said warranted my ear. Come with me, and we'll have a chat."

* * *

Jan Bergmann wiped his forehead as he came out of the mine. They had to seal off another area that day due to the danger it posed. Only the heavens knew what was going on with his mine, he thought as he took a long and hard gulp from his water canteen. The town used to be a blossoming little mining town behind Wall Rose, producing high-quality iron and copper ore for the smithies nearby. Due to the mine, life was prosperous in the town until a few years ago when the first explosion occurred.

Nobody knew what happened. One moment, everything was fine. The next, there was chaos. It was as if there was an earthquake, but the mine was properly reinforced to mitigate that damage. And then, bloodied miners were rushing out asking for stretchers. He remembered running toward the mine with his father. The old man thought a part of the tunnel had collapsed until he saw men on stretches coming out of the mine with their limbs blown off.

He was surprised initially. The mine never used much dynamite and every time they did his father had always been on site inside the mine to supervise. Out of the dozen miners carried out of the mine, only two survived, and neither one of them knew much about what happened. They were a bit far from the explosion to really understand what caused it at the time, so the incident was dismissed as a tragedy.

But then, there was another one. And another. And another. Sections of the mine were sealed off after explosions because of the falling rocks, and those who knew what happened were either blown to pieces or buried under the rocks. His father was in one of those incidents about three years ago. The old man was tough as nails, but he could not fight nature when his entire left arm was ripped from him. Thinking about it still made Jan queasy.

Pieces of evidence gleaned from survivors of these freak explosions suggest tunnels of ore with strange glittering crystals embedded in them. A piece of that ore eventually made its way to the surface, and he had had that in his office since the old man passed. On first glance, they were not anything special; he had seen plenty of glittering ores before, and these crystals were too small to be used as gemstones. But explosions seemed to happen at places where they encounter these things in greater quantities.

He was not sure if these crystals actually caused the accident. After all, plenty of things in the mine could explode, like pockets of gas accidentally escaping cracks in the rock. Precautions were taken against those, of course; he had the tunnels lit with safe lamps, built ventilation shafts, and trained all the miners in safe operating procedures, but nobody ever said that these precautions were foolproof. Even with these measures, deadly accidents were much more frequent with this mine than the others, earning it the nickname "Gaia's Temper" among other crasser ones.

Business dwindled after the chain of deadly accidents. Ores coming out of the mine was still of high quality, but fewer and fewer people were willing to put their life on the line for some meager chunks of iron and copper. The town, too, died down with the decline. People gradually moved out of the houses and closed their shops to find other opportunities in other safer mines, and at the moment only a single tavern and smithy remained open.

Jan was also thinking about selling the mine to some noble dimwit who had way too much money and not enough sense. Erik, his oldest son, was only 10 years old. Sure, he was old enough to take care of the mine when his old man kicked the bucket, but if something happened to him tomorrow his son would not cut it. The soldiers in the Recon Corp having charmed that little twit enough to make him want to join their suicidal outfit did not help. Moving to the northern part of the Wall could get rid of that unhealthy obsession, Jan scratched his dirt-caked curly hair; the Recon Corp never bothered visiting there and military presence there was minimal.

He shoved against the back door of the foreman's office, the lock needing a good smack to work just like his oldest. The door itself swung open with a creak and banged against the side wall, producing a rather loud noise. He was surprised to find that there were a handful of women inside the office, and he was even more dismayed to find Erik looking up at the ladies dressed in Garrison fatigues with awed eyes.

"Erik, c'mere; you're bothering our guests," he called to his son, his mind still hanging onto the last thread of thought he had. He was familiar with the woman, having dealt with her on numerous occasions concerning the "accidents". Indirectly, military acquisitions consisted big chunks of the mine's income, but he needed his oldest son to stay alive. "To what do I owe the pleasure, Miss Rheinberger?"

"Business as usual, Jan," Anka answered with a small smile as she walked forward. The four women at the back were too busy examining his office to care at all about the small talk. "We need some information and maybe a trip down the mine."

"Information I can give depending on what you're asking, but the trip down there is a big no-no," he pulled a dirty towel off of the rack behind his desk and wiped his face before sitting down. Erik reluctantly walked toward his father; the young one was obviously not happy about being pulled away from the soldiers he idolized. "I got enough problems as it is. Step on a wrong pebble and you'd blow my mine straight up a Titan's asshole."

"An exploding mine," one of the women behind Anka—the one with white hair—stroked her chin. The other three were back to the real world by then, and they were exchanging looks with smiles on their faces. "The information we're asking for is related to the explosions."

"Stuff blows up in the mine. What do you want to know?" Strange that they would ask about that all of a sudden, and stranger that they smiled about it. The Garrison and the Military Police took some interest when the explosions happened at first because some relatives of dead miners accused his old pops of not observing proper procedures or some other bullshit, but it died down after a thorough investigation. The old man also greased the officers with some fancy stuff, but he was not about to let the world know that.

"From what we know, this mine explodes more than usual, Mr. Bergmann. Do you know why?" The white-haired girl pressed forward. She fitted better for a fancy nightgown than a set of dirt-colored military uniform, Jan thought.

"Hell if I know. Could be gas or some other shit."

"Things have been exploding and you don't even know why?"

"Hey, don't look at me like I'm some sort of imbecile! I want to get to the bottom of this like everyone else, alright? A lot of people died in that mine."

"Wait, Weiss, take a look at that," the small girl with short red hair tapped the white princess' shoulder, and all of them turned around. Jan followed their eyes, too; it turned out they were looking at the sample of ore he got sitting in a glass jar on his shelf of stuff.

"Don't touch that!" He barked as Weiss walked toward the shelf, but she did not stop. He had to get up and almost sprint toward the girl: "I said don't touch that!"

But it was too late. Weiss grabbed the jar, and Jan knew better than to lay his hands on a woman with such a dangerous thing in her hand. She twisted the lid open, and reached inside.

"What are you doing?" Jan almost bellowed. He was not about to be blown up inside his own office; that would be too embarrassing a way to die: "You want to get us all killed?"

"I know what I'm doing. Besides, a glass jar isn't going to stop a Dust explosion," Weiss picked up the piece of glittering ore, tossing aside the jar. She gingerly held the rather large rock and caressed it with her fingers before staring at it intently for a few seconds.

"Dust explosion? What? We aren't mining coal here."

"These crystals are called Dust, you idiot!" The girl turned around. Jan was a little bit incensed at the patronizing voice she had, but his only display of dissatisfaction was a scowl and crossed arms in front of his chest. "Let me put it into short words and speak slowly enough that even you can understand. The ore you have here is the richest small-crystal Dust vein I've ever seen. You know why your mine explodes so frequently? Every once in a while a worker would strike one of these rocks with a sharp metal pick. It crushes some crystals into powder, and then sends it up into the air. Eventually there's going to be enough powdered Dust in the air that the entire place would blow up with a sneeze, like _someone_ did during her first day at school!"

"You're never going to let me live that down, are you," the girl with the red cloak muttered.

"No. No, I'm not," Weiss snapped with a short snort.

Jan's brows furrowed: "That's—I've never heard of something like that before. Besides, we installed ventilation shafts to prevent gas explosions!"

"Well, Dust is kind of heavy so it doesn't move all that well. Your ventilation shaft only helped mitigate gas explosions. Powdered Dust aren't removed that easily," Weiss snapped at Jan. "You have to constantly sprinkle water on the work surface. That traps the powder Dust from the air and drains them to somewhere that you can collect and precipitate it to get whatever you can out of the mine."

"Would that even work?"

"Of course it will! Unlike you, I actually know what I'm doing. My family runs a multi-national conglomerate off of the Dust mines we have." The girl puffed her chest with a proud smirk, "and you, Mister Foreman, are sitting on top of a large mountain of gold."

"What gold? All I see is dynamite and more dynamite," Jan scoffed. How would someone even go about use something this unstable? Besides, they already had dynamite and explosives, and those worked rather well.

Weiss smirked and placed her hands on her hips, strutting her chest like a proud rooster: "Lucky for you, _I _know exactly what and how we can use it. I'll teach you how to mine and process it; all you need to do is give us ten percent of your production."

"So, you're telling me, you're going to get ten percent of what we make just for something that's going to kill more of my workers?"

"Knowing how to use Dust can turn the entire war against the Titans around, but we need a stable supply source first," the girl with the short red hair said. Jan shifted his stance when he looked at her: there was a certain conviction in her eyes. "Without an end to the war, it doesn't matter where your workers die. At least, if they would die in the mines, they would have done their part for humanity's survival."

"Besides, when done properly, mining Dust isn't going to kill anyone," Weiss added. "And all of this would make you a very wealthy man even with the ten percent we get."

"What makes you say that?"

"Use your brain for a minute, would you? Think about it. You being the supplier of the Dust that the military uses to retake Wall Maria and exterminate the Titans once and for all; what do you think that does to your publicity? Not to mention, if things go well, there'd be a lot of money flowing into your pocket from the military, because they're going to be using a lot of Dust and you're going to be the supplier of it all."

Jan stroked his bearded chin. If the bizarre claims this prissy princess had been spouting for the past ten minutes were true, it would be an incredible opportunity to cash in. Erik and his other children could use some better clothes and toys, and he needed to buy Sara something nice to keep her from complaining about… uh, just about everything. Besides, what had he got to lose? If the girl was lying, with any luck she and her friends would be killed in a blast. Then he would just go back to the plan he had for the mine and sell it to some poor schmuck: "I still got my doubts about everything you're saying here, but let's just see how it goes, all right?"

"Wonderful," the princess gave a small smirk before looking around: "Let's put all that on paper. I can't sleep well without knowing that there's a paper trail somewhere."

"Ugh, whatever." Paperwork. His favorite. Jan shook his head and patted his son on the head. The little kid turned and gave him a big grin; he was probably thinking that he could get to see these big sisters more often now that they had come to an agreement.

"Weiss, you can handle things from here, right? We need to go find the smiths and the chemists," the girl with the red hood turned around. "I have a feeling that they'd know what to do with the knowledge I have."

"Yeah, yeah, go get your bullets and gunpowder. I'll take care of things on this end," Weiss waved dismissively with a small smile before walking toward the desk. "Now, Mr. Foreman, let's iron out the details of the deal…"


End file.
